So, as readers may have gathered from the screaming headlines in the Establishment Media Organs, we in Central Texas had a spot of rain this last weekend. What wasn’t in the mainstream news was the fact that we have had local warnings and alerts of rain and thunderstorms and the like, about every other day for the last two or three weeks, and most of those warnings amounted to just a piddling few drops – with one exception, about two weeks ago. My backyard rain gauge registered 6 and a half inches in the space of an hour and a half around 3 in the morning on that day. Such weather antics have kept my garden lush and green into midsummer, and the lawns of those of my neighbors who have them, similarly lush. Some of our summers are like that, alternated with summers that go three digit-temperatures without a drop of rain in sight for three months in a row.
The early-morning storm which dropped half a foot of precipitation on our suburb two weeks ago also fueled a flashflood on Salado Creek at 5 AM, which punched across the stretch of a major highway access road and carried away 15 automobiles driven by early commuters on their way to work, leaving the bodies of 11 drivers scattered for a mile and a half farther downstream. Kind of embarrassing, to know that one can readily drown in the heart of a major city, but that is Texas for you, and not the first time this has happened, either. San Antonio is threaded by several good-sized creeks and one river, which on the odd occasion become catastrophically more than good-sized. The generous availability of clear, sweet springs, creeks and rivers was the reason that the city and a string of colonial missions was founded here by the Spanish in the first place anyway.
On a Friday night in October 1998, a massive storm system dumped rain on the Hill Country. The weather authorities were never certain of exactly how much rain fell, as all the available official rain gauges topped out at 24 inches. Not much fell on the city itself that night – in fact, I had set the sprinklers to run in my garden, on seeing that the chances of rain that day were rated at about 40%; hardly any chance at all. But all that following morning and through midday, the rain that had fallen in the Hill Country north of San Antonio came roaring down from the hills and inundated the city; Leon Creek, Salado Creek, the San Antonio River itself. I happened to be working at the local public radio station that Saturday – it was the weekend of the pledge drive. All that day, the lists of closed streets and flooded intersections and neighborhoods kept mounting up. And up. And up, until I wondered if I would be able to get home at all, since it seemed that half the city was flooded. The lower stretch of IH-35 through downtown was filled with water, the parkland above the Olmos Dam (which along with some interesting engineering schemes prevents downtown San Antonio from flooding out entirely) filled up, and only heroic efforts by volunteers rescued horses from a stable on Salado Creek near where the old Austin Highway crosses over it. Since that year, much of the real estate on the banks of the Salado have been converted to a park and greenway, with paved paths for joggers and bicyclists, but the dangers of flash floods within city limits endure – just as it does in the Hill Country.
Just ten years ago, over Memorial Day weekend, a similar heavy rainfall poured into the Blanco River, on the eastern edge of the Hill Country, and devastated the town of Wimberley. Again at night, again over a holiday weekend, catching local residents and visitors by surprise. Two families vacationing in a house by the river were lost when the rising river carried the house away entirely and smashed it into a bridge; one family were close relatives of a good neighbor of ours. Only the father of one family and the family dog survived when the house was smashed apart upon hitting a bridge. Two bodies were never found; my neighbor is still heartbroken over this, and as one might imagine, this last weekend brought it all back. He reminded me when we spoke yesterday, of how the Hill Country is also known as flash flood alley; the soil is thin and clay-like, and the river may be just a gentle trickle ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
This last weekend was the one hundredth time, it would seem. I had written an episode in one of the Luna City chronicles, based on the Wimberley flash flood but giving it a happier ending. In the brief info-dump essay preceding that adventure, I wrote: The river, which for years might have been a gentlemanly placid and waist-deep trickle between steep banks, meandering over a wide stretch of polished gravel, water-scoured bedrock, and small thickets of rushes … will drink deep of a sudden heavy rainfall, and go mad.
*And on the unjust fella
But mostly on the just, because
The Unjust steals the Just’s umbrella!