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Rainy Days
Wed Jun 30, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Seattle writer David Laskin is all wet.
On Monday, October 20, 2003, my home city of Seattle broke, indeed shattered, a major
record. No, the Mariners did not finally win the pennant – it was the weather that blew
us out of the stadium. During the 24 hours of that day, 5.02 inches of rain fell on
SeaTac Airport, crushing the previous daily record by a whopping 1.28 inches.
Rainiac that I am, I would have been totally jumping for joy had I not discovered water
spreading across my kitchen counter from a leak in the roof. "Wasn’t that storm
amazing?" I gushed to my friend Fix Everything Gary who came by the next day to take a
look at the damage. Gary snorted. "Where I come from in southern Florida, a decent
thunderstorm can drop that much rain in half an hour."
Feeling a bit, well, dampened, I made a few calls to check out the numbers. Gary was
right. Miami’s daily record was more than triple ours – a brimming 16.21 inches
straddling April 25-26, 1979. "It wasn’t even a hurricane," the National Weather Service
guy in Miami informed me, "just a very juicy occluded front." New York beat us handily –
I’m still talking rain, not baseball – on October 8-9, 1903, when Central Park got
soaked with 11.17 inches. Even Los Angeles nudged us out with a 5.88 inch
drenching on March 2, 1938.
But nothing even comes close to the national record of – ready? – 43.15 inches of rain
that Hurricane Claudette dumped on Alvin, Texas, between July 22 and 23, 1979. And
they call Seattle the Rain City? The good people of Alvin should sue.
The Weather Notebook is supported by the National Science Foundation, and Subaru:
Driven By What’s Inside.
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