Hurricane Ian Rainfall

It’s much wetter than usual here in The Swamp on the Saint Johns River in Central Florida. We are all waiting, but not with the eager anticipation of children on Christmas Eve, for the arrival of Hurricane Ian.

Yesterday there were a few brief sprinkles of rain lasting just a few minutes each. It was calm when I went to bed but I became aware of the sound of rain and woke up long enough to look at my watch and see it was 1:57 am. Now, at 8:52, it has been steadily raining ever since. Not heavy, yet, since the storm hasn’t even come ashore as far as I can see, but it has been non-stop wet.

I’m just a fraction of a hair to the northeast of the dot marking Orlando.

The sayers are soothing between 10 and 20 inches of rain. How much is that? Well, years ago after devastating rains in Chiriqui Province Panama wiped out one of the major bridges on the Panamerican Hwy, I figured that out.

When it’s said that an “inch” of rain has fallen it means that an acre of land would be covered with one inch of water. According to the U.S. Geological Survey that’s 27,154 GALLONS! Let’s say we here in the environs of The Swamp fall in the middle of that sooth-said rain prediction and get 15 inches of the wet. That’s 407,310 gallons of water over every acre.

An Olympic-sized swimming pool is 165 feet long and 56 feet wide and is at least 6 feet deep. It holds about 660,000 gallons, of water. There are 640 acres per square mile: 260,678,400 gallons of water. The city of DeBary, in which our section of The Swamp is located, has 18.2 square miles of dry land. Well, if it isn’t raining. So, that’s 11,648 acres. OR 4,744,346,880 gallons of water. Nearly four and three quarters of a BILLION gallons. Enough to fill 7,188.4 Olympic-sized swimming pools. (God, you have to have a REALLY SICK MIND to figure that crap out.)

Enjoy your day, peeps, and try and stay dry.