A friend of mine who the the author of the linked article told me last night that we officially got 7.5 inches of rain in the 90 minute period Monday in Coweta. That is probably an inch or so more than we got at my house. Probably the worst local flash flooding Coweta has ever had. Even on my little hill, it was an amazing thing to see that much water unable to get anywhere. Then when the large hail started falling into the standing water, it looked like a storm at sea. This link (hope it works) and the photo gallery there shows some of the flooding an hour or two after the event, for those that are familiar with Coweta. Probably not too interesting for others. I wish there was a picture of the flood waters pouring out of Coweta Creek into the Arkansas River a mile away, but the town was cut off from there until the water went down, so no access for pictures. Afterwards when I drove across the river bridge there were dozens of large trees washed into the Arkansas around the mouth of the creek, yet the river intself had little flow. Very unusual looking. The ice storm remnants probably contributed to the water level also. Here is a link that might be useful: Coweta damage gallery

Our indoor shelter is a separate room and has a big heavy metal door that opens to the inside. Once you are inside with the door closed it has big dead bolt type locks in three places on the door. The door frame was in when the concrete was poured so it is imbedded. The outside dimensions are 10x12 but since the walls are 9 1/2 inches thick the interior is much smaller. From inside out it is 1/2 inch waferboard, 2 inches of rigid foam insulation, four inches of re-enforced concrete, 2 more inches of rigid foam insulation, 1/2 inch of wafer board, and 1/2 inch of concrete board. The walls and ceiling were poured in one pour but the ceiling is 6 inches of HEAVILY re-enforced concrete then has a metal roof over that so it looks just like a regular room without windows. We have a small dorm size refrigerator inside where we keep drinks and meds that have to be refrigerated. In the small freezer we keep frozen cold packs which would continue to keep the refrigerator cold for some time if we lost power. We have a small generator that we could move to the outside and use for lights and to cool the refrigerator if we had damage to our home and no electricity. We have ready to eat food, a small portable Coleman toilet, water, ready-to-drink juice and emergency supplies. We decided today that we are going to switch some things around so that we have room to store at least one dutch oven. We also have a large pan that works like a slow cooker and runs off a propane bottle which we are thinking of putting in there. Much of this can't be used inside the shelter, but would make it possible for you to survive on your own property in the event of a disaster. We don't have a place to sleep inside, but the refrigerator sits up on a shelf and on the opposite side are 6 folding chairs. The generator rolls under the shelf where the chairs are stored. We have a filing cabinet inside with our important papers, birth certificates, passports, marriage licenses, taxes, property files and genealogy records. We aren't alarmist, but I like to be prepared and my husband has a terminal case of Boy Scout. LOL We still don't have everything like we want it but we are making progress. We feel like if we are at home when one strikes then we should be able to protect ourselves from the storm and we have enough supplies on hand that we could "stay put" and not have someone out looking for us. I guess we have had good training for this. In the cold places we have lived, like Colorado, northern Michigan, and Alaska, we had to keep our car stocked with winter emergency supplies. In another country where we lived, we keep a suitcase packed at all times so we could be ready to leave if needed. No matter where you live there are possible emergency conditions and everyone needs to think about them before they happen. People that we don't even know have asked if they can come look at our shelter. We just had an elderly man and woman this month that came with our contractor to take a peek so they can decide how big to make the one they plan to have build. More and more people are feeling the need for a home shelter.

I live in Gulfport, Ms. Until Katrina I loved it here, now I have a few doubts, I lost my brand new home,we had lived in it 8 days,it was hit by a tornado. We are now back in our home and working very hard at making this house into a home. We have been here 28 years, I say I wasn't born in the South but got here as fast as I could. I grew up in Chillicothe,Ohio. Love the forum, also garden junk forum. Nancy

Amy, Unfortunately it is about to start feeling like July. The good thing about the rain is it has kept us cooler. There's no rain in my 7-day forecast, so I expect we'll dry out a lot over the next week, and we're expected to hit the upper 90s early next week. Can 100 degrees be far behind? Bon, Yay for the rain. You did need it and I'm glad you got it. You may feel stormed out, but it will be a fleeting feeling. We are about to feel the wrath of July heat + high humidity from all the moisture in the ground, so I think it is going to feel worse for a while before it feels better. Carol, Well, Grove was overdue for some heavy rainfall and apparently it finally happened. With all the accidents on the lake over the July 4th weekend, I hope people will be exceptionally carefully out there on the water now that there's all the runoff from all that rainfall. I have about half of my garden weeded and more or less under control---the upper half that dries out more quickly. I got a lot of that weeding done in the two hours I was out there this morning. I quickly harvested the one row of tomato plants that I hadn't harvested from prior to the storm, and then I weeded, weeded, weeded as the sun climbed higher in the sky and the temperatures began heating up. The fence lines are a mess, though, and I have to go slowly and carefully with them because that's one of the favorite hiding places of the timber rattlers. I do the same thing with rain gauges. I've noticed that even the radar-indicated rainfall this year has rarely matched what I've recorded in my rain gauge, and neither does our mesonet station's. It's why I try to keep an unbroken rain gauge (and occasionally a slightly-cracked one that manages to record most of the rainfall) out in the yard at all times. I left the one that cracked in the winter and put a new one beside it. There is only about a 0.10" difference between the two, so the broken one is almost recording correctly. Dorothy, For so long this year, I was worried y'all weren't getting enough rain, but I can see now that you're getting plenty. Last year was perfect for us in terms of rainfal, beginning in mid-June, and once the rain started, it's hardly stopped at all. Prior to mid-June, the drought was so bad I was about to close the garden gate and walk away, so the rain began falling in the nick of time. It can stop now if it wants. After the drought years of 2011-2013, I am just thrilled to have plenty of rainfall and (so far) not too many grasshoppers. It has been a struggle all year to keep up with the bare minimum of mowing, trimming and hand-weeding, but we just keep plugging along, doing what we can when we can and not worrying or fretting about what we can't get done. You can only do whatever the conditions, weather and time available allow, so I try not to worry about the rest. Eventually we'll get it all done. Sandplum, I weeded all I could this morning and was happy with what I got done, but some of those weeds were so big already that I had to dig them out rather than pulling them out. I'll get out there in the cool early morning hours tomorrow and try to work on it for another 2-4 hours. In June and July the harvesting and canning keeps me too busy to focus too much on weeding, and the rain this year has made weeding even harder to accomplish, but the tomato canning is winding down now, so I should get to weed every day for the next week, especially with no rain in the forecast. I think that with a week of weeding every morning, I should catch up on the backlog of weeds waiting to be removed. Y'all, I don't remember exactly what our all-time record rainfall is, but I believe it is around 59". I need to look it up and see. I am fairly certain we'll break that record this year, as Burneyville is sitting at 54" right now. Never, ever, even after 2007, did I think we'd see that sort of rainfall here. Dawn