Drip Dry Week
This is Austin, Texas...and would someone please hand us a towel?!
You may have seen on the boob toob some of the flooding here abouts. Nothing really too drastic in Austin proper, but the Highland Lakes chain upstream on the Colorado River is damn near bursting at the seams. It's been raining off and on (mainly "on") since the weekend. Today's been our first (and will be our only) dry day of the week; more rain's due in tomorrow by noontime.
When there are disasters, it's "busy time" for us news types. As I've mentioned before, my day normally starts at the Travis County Jail, checking the overnight booking sheet to see which ne'er-do-wells got hauled in overnight and whether any of them is "saucy" enough (my boss' term) to make a decent story in the early morning. Well, I haven't spent one morning at the jail this week. It starts our kinda depressing, really.
Monday morning, with sheets of rain pouring down before sunrise, I found myself on I-35 heading for San Marcos in Hays County. It seems that a young couple had been driving in the rain Sunday night and wound up getting washed off a low water crossing over the Blanco River. The woman driving managed to call 911 for help before she and the man riding with her bailed out and tried to swim to something not flowing by at 30 MPH. Rescuers came quickly, but it took them an hour to pluck him off of a tree 100 yards downstream. By that time, no one could find her. By the time I got there, she'd been missing for nearly 9 hours. I spent the day there, talking to authorities and doing live reports in almost every newscast until 1:30. We found out that she would turn 25 next Wednesday, but when I left at 2:00, there was still no sign of the woman. It didn't look good.
I was back on the Blanco again Tuesday morning, as the rescue mission turned into a recovery operation. Some of the woman's co-workers from a San Marcos pizza joint came up to help in the search. Talking to them was a revelation. It turns out this 24-year-old woman had been back from Iraq for about three months. She was a combat medic, and she'd been wounded by an Iraqi she was treating. One of the co-workers told me she had continued treating the wounded Iraqi before she was treated herself. She had received the Silver Star for bravery just a few weeks ago. And to die in a river she drove over, likely knowing that she was driving through high water! Now that's waste!
Wednesday morning was the most hellacious of all. Very heavy rain had rolled through Austin overnight, forcing several roads to close due to flooding. I was dispatched the city/county Emergency Operations Center, where we have a remote transmitter and theoretically have our finger on the pulse of the situation. Considering that I got there at 5:45 and it took them until almost 7 to find the key to open the equipment closet so I could use that transmitter, you can tell how the morning went. While I was there, STARFlight (the neighborhood rescue helicopter) was sent to that same low water crossing in Hays County to pluck a couple of Texas State University students out of the Blanco. There were barricades up, closing the road, but they plodded through anyway and nearly got killed. They were ticketed for dangerous behaviour, and deservedly so. It's one thing when the water comes out of nowhere; it's another to dodge a barricade when the friggin' road's blocked with a big ol' sign saying, "Road Closed Due to High Water."
This morning found me atop Mansfield Dam on the Colorado River. Three floodgates were open to release some of the upstream pressure, so that was the story. Just after my first live report at 6am, I heard a siren below me, signalling a fourth gate was opening. That moved the story below the dam, where I did reports on the rising water and how close it was getting to the houses along that upper reach of Lake Austin. Punctuate that with a low-speed chase that ended with shots fired (but no one hurt) about a quarter mile away from me, and you can see how my week has gone.
But I'm drawn back to the low water crossing thing. Perhaps it's just being an Oregonian abroad, but it doesn't cease to amaze me how stupid these locals can be. It's more important to get somewhere in this car that they love and warning signs be damned than it is to go around and take a little extra time. It makes me miss home a little more.
You may have seen on the boob toob some of the flooding here abouts. Nothing really too drastic in Austin proper, but the Highland Lakes chain upstream on the Colorado River is damn near bursting at the seams. It's been raining off and on (mainly "on") since the weekend. Today's been our first (and will be our only) dry day of the week; more rain's due in tomorrow by noontime.
When there are disasters, it's "busy time" for us news types. As I've mentioned before, my day normally starts at the Travis County Jail, checking the overnight booking sheet to see which ne'er-do-wells got hauled in overnight and whether any of them is "saucy" enough (my boss' term) to make a decent story in the early morning. Well, I haven't spent one morning at the jail this week. It starts our kinda depressing, really.
Monday morning, with sheets of rain pouring down before sunrise, I found myself on I-35 heading for San Marcos in Hays County. It seems that a young couple had been driving in the rain Sunday night and wound up getting washed off a low water crossing over the Blanco River. The woman driving managed to call 911 for help before she and the man riding with her bailed out and tried to swim to something not flowing by at 30 MPH. Rescuers came quickly, but it took them an hour to pluck him off of a tree 100 yards downstream. By that time, no one could find her. By the time I got there, she'd been missing for nearly 9 hours. I spent the day there, talking to authorities and doing live reports in almost every newscast until 1:30. We found out that she would turn 25 next Wednesday, but when I left at 2:00, there was still no sign of the woman. It didn't look good.
I was back on the Blanco again Tuesday morning, as the rescue mission turned into a recovery operation. Some of the woman's co-workers from a San Marcos pizza joint came up to help in the search. Talking to them was a revelation. It turns out this 24-year-old woman had been back from Iraq for about three months. She was a combat medic, and she'd been wounded by an Iraqi she was treating. One of the co-workers told me she had continued treating the wounded Iraqi before she was treated herself. She had received the Silver Star for bravery just a few weeks ago. And to die in a river she drove over, likely knowing that she was driving through high water! Now that's waste!
Wednesday morning was the most hellacious of all. Very heavy rain had rolled through Austin overnight, forcing several roads to close due to flooding. I was dispatched the city/county Emergency Operations Center, where we have a remote transmitter and theoretically have our finger on the pulse of the situation. Considering that I got there at 5:45 and it took them until almost 7 to find the key to open the equipment closet so I could use that transmitter, you can tell how the morning went. While I was there, STARFlight (the neighborhood rescue helicopter) was sent to that same low water crossing in Hays County to pluck a couple of Texas State University students out of the Blanco. There were barricades up, closing the road, but they plodded through anyway and nearly got killed. They were ticketed for dangerous behaviour, and deservedly so. It's one thing when the water comes out of nowhere; it's another to dodge a barricade when the friggin' road's blocked with a big ol' sign saying, "Road Closed Due to High Water."
This morning found me atop Mansfield Dam on the Colorado River. Three floodgates were open to release some of the upstream pressure, so that was the story. Just after my first live report at 6am, I heard a siren below me, signalling a fourth gate was opening. That moved the story below the dam, where I did reports on the rising water and how close it was getting to the houses along that upper reach of Lake Austin. Punctuate that with a low-speed chase that ended with shots fired (but no one hurt) about a quarter mile away from me, and you can see how my week has gone.
But I'm drawn back to the low water crossing thing. Perhaps it's just being an Oregonian abroad, but it doesn't cease to amaze me how stupid these locals can be. It's more important to get somewhere in this car that they love and warning signs be damned than it is to go around and take a little extra time. It makes me miss home a little more.