Indeed, 5 inches of rain is a LOT of rain, particularly up there in the hills. But, I've heard too on the radio that the 'catch basins' up there have plenty of room for more run-off! Seems contradictory, and indeed we need rain to even hope to fill up some of the reservoirs that we depend on.
Ron, they spent months cleaning those catch basins up this last spring. My folks live up that way and they had heavy trucks going up and down Boston literally all summer. I’m sure they were doing the same thing over around Briggs. Both streets have water channels that are fed from above. There are probably two or three other channels in between.
I’m not sure exactly what they were doing, but they were obviously moving a lot of dirt. The trucks were large dump trucks. They were going up empty and going down full.
That work has evidently paid off. Frankly, I’m amazed that with the rain we have had, there hasn’t been more problems. They were showing run-off on one street thought to be a problem, and it was crystal clear, no mud or particulate matter.
We just had a cloud burst here. I live just north of Glendale College, which is about seven miles directly south of the areas at risk. For about a half hour the clouds opened up and poured rain on my location. The sun came out just long enough to provide a very nice rainbow.
It had been raining for several hours when the heavy rain hit.