My experience with floods

I was watching O'Reilly this evening and was struck by the extraordinary misfortune that has befallen New Orleans. It can be quite a frightening experience for those people who are caught in the situation.

I vividly remember the floods we experienced about 25 years ago while living in Lucknow, India. Lucknow is a city on the banks of the river Gomti. Every year during the monsoons the river swells and threatens to flood the city. Just like New Orleans the city was protected by levees at strategic places, but these would invariably break (corruption ensured that the levees were always substandard). But it would never flood seriously.

But that year, during the monsoons, it rained continously for about 10 days and what we suspected happened. The Gomti burst its banks and flooded the city. The floods happened overnight. When we woke in the morning, all we could see from the windows (the bedrooms happened to be on the upper floor) was a vast expanse of water surrounding all our homes. We were lucky that this lasted just the day. The water subsided the next day.

Of course we had no support during that time. The government was non-existent in its presence. But then, at that time, no one in India seriously expected the government to be of any help. It was always every man (or woman) to himself (or put your faith in God or Karma if anything untoward happened).

The kids loved it. They wanted to go out and play in the water. They were naturally forbidden from doing so because the water was crawling with all kinds of creatures.

Needless to say the furniture and kitchen (both on the first floor) were ruined. It took us several days to scrub the river mud out of the floors. When nature decides to run amock there is nothing one can do except sit back and hope for the best.