Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Crazy weather (Hermine)

The weather is crazy down here. The first three weeks after our arrival, it was nothing but sunshine, high of 37 °C and low of 25 °C, every single day. To us, that felt really hot, especially when standing in a parking lot in early afternoon. Then again, the heat is drier than in Montreal, and every single building has air-conditioning, so on a day-to-day basis, it’s not that bad. This is actually a mild summer for Texas (in the summer of 2009, there were 59 consecutive days with temperatures over 100 °F, along with the drought you can imagine; this year, while every other place on Earth is having heat that shatters all previous records, San Antonio has barely broken the 100 °F-mark on a day or two).

The thing is that the soil in San Antonio absorbs very little water, so when it does rain, flooding occurs, and a few people drown each time because they try to cross flooded waterways (despite flood gauges installed prominently). Last week, we finally had some rain, but nothing major. There was a storm with hours of lightning, but no thunder. Today is the first full day of rain, and the backyard in our apartment complex is flooded (there’s an alarm blaring as I write this). I’m glad we’re not living on the ground floor right now, and I’m even gladder that we can still access the front of the building, because Darwin still has to pee every once in a while – not to mention the Engineer has classes to teach. Luckily, the apartment complex has pumps to fix the problem, and they’re on a generator, so they were not affected by the power failure brought on by the storm. There is flooding all over town, and some classes are even cancelled!

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