Let me start by saying that, in my defense, I did realize that it was raining last night. The thunder woke me up and I heard the rain. Then I promptly rolled over and fell back asleep. It wasn’t until I got up this morning and looked at my phone, that I saw the videos and pictures from the guys.
During a heavy rain, it’s a fairly common occurrence for the road in front of the house to flood (or any number of roads around the city). Even the front yard fills up with water sometimes. If the rain is blowing in the right direction, we've had the upstairs balcony fill up a bit with water and waterfall down the stairs.
But we’ve never had anything happen like what happened last night.
60 cm (23.5 inches) of rain fell on the city in just a few hours. I went to bed after 1 AM and the rain hadn’t started yet. The pictures from the boys started arriving around 4:30 AM.
That's a bit of a problem. Here's a video of Paul wandering around the living room.... =)
Fortunately, the city is built for big rains, and most of the water drained away fairly quickly. No doubt low lying areas will still be affected for awhile though.
At any rate, then came the clean-up.
The good thing with South American houses is that it's all cement and ceramic, so water doesn't do that much damage. Most of the things we had stored were in plastic containers as well. A few things did get wet, so it did take a bit of work to go through it all. Fortunately there were lots of hands to get the job done.
Before we got to work though, it was Mario's birthday...so we ate salteñas to celebrate and give us the necessary strength to get the job done! =)
It was also a good opportunity to go through a few boxes we hadn't looked at in a long time, and get rid of a few things. That's usually how this works...
There was a fair amount of water damage around the city as well. The canal by our house (which is probably close to ten feet deep) nearly overflowed. It caved in part of the cement wall of the canal.
For sure many people lost possessions and even cars and houses in some areas (Isabel has a friend who lost his car in the underground parking of his apartment building when it flooded). All things considered, we came through this well. It was a bit of an adventure, but I guess we're used to that by now.
Please be praying for the people who will be cleaning up and still recovering from this for the foreseeable future. For people who have already lost so much because of the quarantine and lock-down, this is just one more difficult blow. Bolivians tend to take these moments with humour and a "well, that's life" attitude...but that doesn't always lessen the blow.
Here are a few more videos from around the city...
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