I live in a town on San Francisco Bay, about 10 miles from the Pacific Coast. In the past 3 weeks, through last night, we have had 10 very large back-to-back wet storms. Total rainfall here in that time period - over 25 inches! My DH and I are very very lucky - our house is in an old part of town, where they built Victorian houses over ground floor basements (since "6 ft over sea level" is too low to dig underground basements), so we are literally "high and dry", and so far the sump pump is even keeping 95% of our basement dry.

Also we have not ever lost power during these deluges, unlike thousands of people. That is because our house is so old it is part of the original downtown electrical grid (which is now one "outage block" accd to PG&E), which hardly ever is allowed to go out, as it services the City Hall, the main Police headquarters, a fire station, and the Emergency Operations Center. All of these buildings are pretty new, but they are in the same place their predecessors were in 1918 - that was on top of a hill 3 blocks up from the original downtown. I have been told that that was so the horses pulling the fire engines from the at-that-time one and only fire station would "get a good start going downhill" !). So, none of the city emergency facilities have flooded either. Other places in CA have not been so lucky, of course, and it is truly tragic in some areas.

The weather people are now predicting that this series of storms is done, and that tomorrow will actually be sunny. We have had only one day of no pouring rain since Dec 26th, and that was cloudy, so I am sure all of the plants in my garden will welcome some sunshine! Luckily the drainage on our property was improved by my DH 24 years ago when we moved in, when it still rained a lot each winter. So, none of the beds flooded longer than a few hours occasionally when the rain was coming down so fast it could not run off as fast as it was falling. Our gardeners are scheduled to come in 2 days (after we had to cancel their last 2 visits), and I am compiling a list of things they can do re clean-up, only while standing on hardscape of course! Have to be careful what you wish for, but this has solved our local water supply problems for at least 2 years, so that is a silver lining.

Jackie