Wednesday, March 21, 2007

The Flash Flood at our Office


Yesterday, after returning from lunch several people ran inside shouting "Don't go outside! It's a gullywasher!" Of course, I ran to the window to see the hardest rain shower I've ever seen in California. And, it didn't taper off after a couple minutes like they usually do. It kept going for 20 minutes at that rate and then tapered off a little for the next hour. We were estimating it rained about 2 inches in the hour.

About 5 minutes into the torrent, the front desk sent a message to the whole office that the parking garage was flooding.

Most people got their cars moved before it got too deep. The two cars in the back of the photo fared the worst. You can see a guy crawling in through his trunk to avoid opening his doors. He was able to move his car. The Audi next to it was completely flooded in the engine compartment and had to be towed. But, not before the owner (one of our marketing guys) waded out in his tighty-whities to try to start it.

Of course, my bike was happily stowed away in the indoor bike parking....

5 comments:

Chris said...

Yikes. Who would ever think that parking in a garage could be detrimental?

chatterbox said...

Yeah, especially since it's an above-ground garage!

Itinerant Rick said...

And your bike was high and dry in the main building, right?

~ lauren said...

what?! it rained that hard? where was I? what time was it at?

it must have only been near you. i don't think it rained that hard in san mateo that morning.

that's so weird.

chatterbox said...

Lauren,

The office is in Cupertino. The storm started around 1:00. I think it was very isolated as the official numbers for San Jose were between .25 and .5 inch.