Tuesday, May 12, 2009

I don't think the rain will ever stop

I just checked for offical totals. Right now my area of arkansas has gotten a total of 7.25 inches of rain since the first of may. We are looking at, at least another week of scattered thunderstorms. It rained off and on all day today. Its suppose to keep going like that for at least another week.

The paper today said we haven't had that kind of rain levels in the month of may for 127 years. To put it in perspective. We average around 49 inches a year. By the time this is over we probably will have gotten a full ten inches this month alone. 49 inches works out to be about four inches a month each year. We will have gotten at least ten by the end of the month. Thats nearly a quarter of the years rain in one month.

The air is staying so heavy with water that right now I feel like you do when you get water up your nose in a swimming pool. The burning has stopped but I still fill like their is water in my sinuses. Thats how wet and humid everything is.

The closest thing to a flood I have seen in Arkansas, in my lifetime, was when I was in K-grade and we got like ten inches of snow in the north east corner complicated a week later by another 4 inches of rain. The flooding which was up to my fathers knee lasted all of about a week. It took a month to get the roads between where we lived and my grandparents reopened due to bridge washouts.

We haven't flooded like that yet. But, its getting bad. Crops are starting to suffer for some of the farmers. Even the rice fields don't know what to do with all this rain. We have a pretty good flooding system. We went down to lake Nimrod and the Nimrod dam Monday on our way back from Mt. Magazine. The flooding there seems under control. They had the flood gates open full blast and the water on the drier side still hadn't covered the rocks enough you couldn't walk across the river bed. Its whole purpose was to help control the flooding. There are three dams on that river that work to control flooding not to mention all the lock and dam's on the Arkansas. Hopefully they will be able to do their job.

But all this rain is going to move out just in time for the Spring thaw in the Rockies. The Arkansas starts up that way. Lets just hope our creeks down here have drained out enough that the Arkansas can handle the load when that water hits or my attempts at gardening and homesteading this year will be for nothing. We aren't in a flood plane, but we are in a flash flood plane. Gotta love it. Not

What I really want to know is how can my plants be withering from to much water while the weeds are growing so fast, I can't keep up with them in this weather?

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