The Weather in Arizona

I don't say much about our Arizona weather here on my blog other than to complain about the heat from time to time, but today I have some photos of something out of the ordinary for us. You may have heard about the excessive rain we had yesterday in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

A very loud thunderstorm woke us in the early hours yesterday morning (around 2:30 a.m.) and kept us awake for a good part of the night - super loud thunder and a steady downpour of rain. We learned later that it was the end result of a hurricane that had formed in the Pacific ocean, dropping 3.29 inches of rain on us yesterday. Now that might not seem like a whole lot, but that's more rain than we typically get during the months of July, August and September combined! And since we live in a desert, we don't really have gutter systems to drain the water away and out of neighborhoods quickly. The photos above and below were taken from our driveway yesterday morning as we prepared to leave our house for work.

 

I was going to slant this blog post by saying it wasn't all that bad. The media really hypes up the news anytime we get even the slightest amount of rain. But the truth is that some parts of the valley retained more water than on our side of town. My brother, who lives on the west side of town, suffered serious damage to his car and tires while driving through a flooded intersection in the early hours of the day. Lots of roads were closed, including one of our major interstates. {You can watch a brief news report here.}

It made for an interesting drive to work yesterday morning, and some people were even forced to stay home for the day. But by time we drove home from work yesterday afternoon, things looked a bit like this, with outer lanes still flooded and sidewalk edges not visible:

And here's our street view when we got home:

A few of my blog readers reached out to me yesterday to make sure we were ok - so sweet of you guys! That prompted me sharing these photos today to let you know that the sun is shining in Arizona today, and I'll probably be complaining about the heat and humidity later this afternoon. Some parts of the valley still have standing water and some folks have some serious property damage to deal with, but we were very fortunate in our part of town.

 

To my far away friends: Thanks for thinking of us yesterday!

To my local friends: How did you weather the storm?

♥