Must Grow Gills
Riccardo and I almost had to swim home from work today. Literally. England had record rainfall today, and for England, that means a LOT of rain. Some places had a month's worth of rain in under an hour.Since we're both off at 3pm on Fridays, and since we're sharing a car these days, I agreed to pick Riccardo up from work. It had been pouring furiously all day, but I didn't understand the extent of it until I was on a back road about halfway between my school and Riccardo's work (about 45 minutes apart) and had to turn around because a portion of the road was under a good 3 feet of water. No exaggeration. Cars attempting to go through the "puddle" were finding themselves immersed almost to the window.
I turned around and took another route, only to find various washouts elsewhere. By the time I reached Riccardo's work, traffic was at a standstill on all routes. The radios going mad with reports of gridlock and flooding. Most of the major highways clogged to a stop because vehicles couldn't pass the flooding.
What should have been a total of a 1.25 hours drive for me, took over 3 hours, and we were lucky. We saw many vehicles stalled out in the middle of newfound lakes, many others stranded in between two such lakes, and were forced to try about 6 different routes before we got one that worked. We are counting our blessings that we didn't end up like so many others: wading our way through waist-deep water while trying to think of a way to convince our insurance company to pay for the car we just submerged.
Upon arriving home, we turned on the news and heard a comical anecdote about a lady in our area who, upon looking out her window this morning, realized the situation was critical as she witnessed her cat swimming across the back garden!
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