Monsoons and Their Consequences

The height of Rainy Season is well and truly here. Pretty much every day is the same now. Sun and bright blue skies in the morning, clouding up from noon on, and drenching downpours with thunder and lightning in the afternoon and evening with the clouds breaking somewhat around sunset. The timing can vary by a couple of hours either way but once the process starts the sequence stays the same.

Last year the town came down our street and reworked the swale alongside the road . . . right up to, but not including our property. They tore up the old grass, retrenched the ditch, laid new culverts under driveways and then re-sodded the whole thing. Stopping at our property line meant not creating a way for our swale to drain into the improved ditch only ten feet away.

Now, every day, we get a four foot wide (though admittedly very shallow) puddle across the foot of the driveway and a temporary moat around the property and a low section in the back becomes a qualified wetlands trysting place for the (immigrant) frogs bellowing all night long. Fortunately (or maybe not), our bedrock is porous limestone and all the water drains down and disappears within hours. I say "maybe not" because all that water seeping through tends to dissolve the limestone, creating caverns which, if the overlying rock is thin enough, cave in on themselves making a sinkhole, although there's only been one in the entire county according to the local sinkhole map which is over twenty years old. Anyway, our area is more prone to subsidence than collapse sinkholes.

It is highly unlikely we will ever realy face a sinkhole, although noe impossible. This is one of the few places in the country where you can get insurance coverage for the earth swallowing up your property.