“I Like Ike!” was a refrain from the election pitting Dwight D. Eisenhower against Adlai Stevenson in the early 1950’s I was a child, but I recall the campaign buttons.
I’m not so sure how I feel about our recent visitor, Ike, the hurricane. The Midwest had an extended line of showers crossing from west to east, and Ike rolled up through Texas, steamrolled over Oklahoma and Kansas and Missouri and attached himself to that line of showers. The forecasters were predicting three inches of rain over a three day period. That’s a lot of rain, but manageable. In reality, O’Hare Airport measured 12.61 inches of rain by early evening on Sunday. Parts of Chicago and the surrounding counties have been hit hard, and farmers are saying that the corn and soybean crops may be damaged. We were fortunate. We’re high and dry, and still have all our utilities.
I went out Sunday morning to collect the newspapers. We have a fairly long driveway, and it was pouring out, so I took the car. While I was down at the end of the road, I stopped to collect Saturday’s mail, too. As our road goes to the east, it passes between two retention ponds, and the road crews had put up barricades to warn drivers of water on the pavement. The ponds were so full that they overflowed their bounds and met on the road. You could get through, if you went very slowly. The barricades were set up so that you had to slalom to the left. and then again to the right. Apparently everyone got the idea that you had to slow down, because there were no cars stranded in the water.
It rained almost non-stop from Friday morning to Sunday evening. It was still sprinkling Monday morning as we went off to exercise, enough to need window wipers, but not enough to keep the standing water from slowing draining off.
The record rain for my area was 17 inches in 24 hours. I can recall pictures of people canoing or rowing from house to house looking for people who needed help. What amazed me was that people would walk in the water without regard to raw sewage or downed electrical lines. What happens to people’s brains when we have unusual weather!?? Our underpasses were closed for a couple of weeks with that storm. I think we’ll clean things up faster with this one, but it will take a lot of work to bring some areas back to where they were before the storms.