Around noon today we had a thunderstorm that lasted maybe half an hour, included hail, and really drenched us: 1.3 inches in that brief time.
To put that in perspective:
Happy Camp has 2975 square feet of roof total. 2975 sq ft = 428400 sq inches. That times 1.3 inches of rain = 556920 cubic inches of rain. Which totals (brace yourself) 2410.9 gallons of water. In about half an hour.
That doesn’t begin to account for the gallons of water rushing down off the mesa, through the arroyos. The arroyo east of our house looked like a whitewater stream, running high and hard. We have many places where we have placed brush or rocks to slow the water down (keeping more of it on the land here), but in a storm this intense, the water just pounds downhill.
And guess what: the clouds have gathered again, and the thunder is beginning anew.