27 March 2007

The Deluge

Yesterday, home, about 3:15 PM. The rain started early in the morning but the deluge came in the early afternoon. All in all 101 mm of rain between 7 AM and 4 PM. I hadn't seen my street flooded like that in years. Others had it much worse. In Funes and Roldán there was hail.





People are being evacuated from several places in the city, especially in the northwest — not coincidentally the part of the city where I live. Some say it's 800 people, others update the figure to 1,150. It's been raining all night and all morning and it's still raining right now: 160 mm up to 9 AM, since yesterday at the same time. Thousands are without power.

The Paraná River rose to 5.06 meters; the alert level is at 5 m, so there's reason to fear, but anyway the problem is in the basin of the Ludueña Stream. I called home from my office today to check on the family, since I was hearing alarming reports in the radio. We all know nothing terrible will happen, not unless a truly catastrophic deluge comes, but when I was 10 (in 1986) the Ludueña overflowed and our downstairs floor got 70 cm of water in it.

And it seems it'll be raining until Friday...

3 comments:

  1. Wow! Something weird is going on with the weather this year...not just in Argentina but all over the world. And no - I don't think it's a global warming :) Just a normal "stuff happens" cycle, I guess. Do you know if the weather was crazy in Salta, by the way? :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. By the way, meant to ask you for some time. I can see bars on windows in pretty much every house in Argentina (well at least in photos). Is this common in all areas? Maybe people keep getting them just of habit?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, there were terrible floods in Salta and other provinces of the northwest earlier this year, caused by rain on the upper basin of the Salado River.

    There are bars and other physical barriers everywhere for safety. Burglary is extremely common. This holds for all large cities and probably many smaller towns as well.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.