The Perfect Storm ...

... And I'm not even referring to Tropical Storm Erin.

Tonight was one of those nights at work where just the right number of things all happened at once and converged to create the perfect disaster of an evening. And I was just lucky enough to be on A1 duty when it happened. You see, on any given front page, you often have one big package of stories that all go together. Some of these go on the front, and the rest go on the jump page. Tonight, there were three of those packages — all on the front page. Just having one of those would have required quite a bit of work. Three was just unheard of (for me at least). I just lived through it all and don't particularly want to relive it, so I won't bore you with the details. Just know that no one died and we made deadline. Some nights, that's all you can hope for.

And then there was the real storm. This one isn't so perfect, but it is bearing down on the Coastal Bend. Tropical Storm Erin is supposed to come ashore between 9 a.m. and noon today, likely just north of Corpus. By tropical storm standards, it's a fairly week storm — winds just above 40 mph. Here on the ever-windy coast, that isn't so outrageous. What's going to get us though is the inches and inches of rain it's going to drop on an already saturated coast. Flooding is going to happen again tomorrow. It's just a question of where and if I'll drive by another submerged vehicle on the way to work. Overhead street signs were particularly helpful as I came home from work last night. People shouldn't try driving through standing water, so the signs offered this spot-on advice:

Turn around
Don't drown

Thanks road signs. I'll keep that in mind.

I'll be storm watching tomorrow morning and early afternoon before I have to head in to work. Perhaps I'll have some of my own pictures. Stay tuned ...

Waterworld

With no school or work to take summerlong breaks from these days, I guess blogging got put on the chopping block. But summertime is waning, so I should get back to it.

As this post's subject suggests, I'm living in a town with water on the brain. Water from the sky and water from the ground. These developments come on the heels of the rainiest July in the history of Corpus. So rainy, in fact, that I drove right by a truck stuck in an intersection submerged in water up to its windows. That's the kind of thing you always hear about or see pictures of but rarely see yourself. Now I can check that one off. As a result of the rain, the ground saturated and the rivers flooded. With all that water filling our water system and no one needing to use it for jobs like watering or irrigating, more water was in the system than our purification system could handle. That was all several weeks ago.

The city has since switched to a straight chlorine solution to purify the city's water. As a result, showering this week has been more like diving into the YMCA pool. Perhaps the actual content of the water isn't like that bad, but the smell is. The taste isn't too tasty either. So people have been angry about that.

After all that, the news today that the city water might have turned up bacteria in a test last week and are recommending we boil our water for the time being. So people are freaking out again, bottles of water flying off the shelves at all the area stores. Never mind that subsequent tests of the water came back clean. I'm guessing that won't be enough to convince people to drink straight from their taps tomorrow.

To top it off, the National Weather Service tonight decided the disturbance out in the Gulf is going to turn in to something and has issued a tropical storm watch for South Texas. This means that tropical storm conditions are possible within the next 36 hours.



And there goes any water that was left on the store shelves.

A tropical storm is classified as such when the winds are between 39 and 73 mph. All reports are that rain is going to be more of an issue with this storm, so the winds will probably be on the low side. And that's a pretty big circle where the storm might end up. Might not even have anything to be concerned about at all.

Not that I'm concerned. I've kind of been looking forward to this ever since moving down here. Maybe "looking forward to" isn't quite right -- more like intrigued. I don't particularly want to experience a major hurricane, but I do have a thing for bad storms (NOTE: not destructive storms). If there's lots of wind, lightning and thunder, then I want a front-row seat. Maybe I'll get one come Thursday. Maybe I won't. But there's still two and a half more months left in storm season. And I'll have a few gallons of water in the pantry just in case.