Trees down and standing water

We have officially made it into the top 10 wettest monsoons in recorded history. There's still much to clean up after Thursday night's big storm cut power to 80,000 homes, including several thousand in Tempe. That night, more than 1,500 lightning strikes were recorded in a single hour. Wind gusts up to 100 mph blew out windows, blew over power poles, uprooted hundred year old trees and demolished an 8 million dollar indoor athletic building at Arizona State University. As is typical with the hit and miss pathway of the monsoons, my neighborhood got heavy rain but was spared the devastating winds, although I'm less than 3 miles from some of the hardest hit areas. 

Monsoon!

Today I was wandering around my back yard, searching my trees for a cicada exoskeleton for today's post. I've heard their familiar buzzing for a couple weeks now, a sure sign that monsoon season is here. The North America monsoon occurs from Mexico north to the southwestern U.S. In Arizona, we receive a lot of high winds, dust storms and heavy violent thunderstorms beginning as early as late June (like this year) and continuing into September. In fact, we get the majority of our annual rain during this time. Most desert plants are adapted to take advantage of the rain when it does arrive, and make do with little for the rest of the year. Rather than having to use a cicada to demonstrate the return of the monsoon, the monsoon showed up itself around 4:00 this afternoon. The rain started off as if poured from a bucket and came down hard for about 40 minutes. When it stopped, almost as suddenly as it had began, the street in front of my home had become a river and a nearby freeway corridor had turned into a lake - stranding all these drivers who had to wait for the water to recede.