News came from my hometown of Boulder, Colorado. This time of year, if I hear disaster news, it is usually a wildfire, not torrential rains. And funny about news like this, you hear it and you are stunned, but somehow it feels like it is over and now it is time to recover. Then it get even worse. More rain. More snow. Aftershocks. The fire spreading. I wonder if it is cinematic conditioning to feel as if there should be only a single climactic moment. Was I surprised when it just kept raining? And still keeps raining!

(from Daily Camera)

Flooding is on the news in general fairly regularly. It’s weird to actually see the footage and hear the stories and have them be from people and places I know. (It took over Facebook more than a Broncos game.) However, even though some people lost everything, many houses had ugly damage, and a few lost their lives, it is comparatively a small disaster casualty-wise compared to the horrendous Uttarakhand floods in June where the death toll is presumed to be well above 5,000. What was the difference? Was it the magnitude of the flood? The inaccessibility of the landscape? The number of people in affected areas? The emergency infrastructure? All of the above? It is difficult to compare and hard to comprehend at that scale.

(from New York Times)

Well, in any case, the 100-year-flood I remember hearing about in high school in Boulder on the 100th anniversary of the last 100-year flood finally happened. That graph says it all.

Three people from my office in India are visiting Boulder this month. They just arrived a week or so ago and had asked me about the weather beforehand. I said it never rains in Boulder. Especially in September…

…whoops.