The Perfect Ending

My night last night was supposed to be a breeze. After three days in a row of 12 hour shifts I was looking forward to my Friday night being only 8 hours long. Mother Nature had other plans.

Texas had a tropical storm system plow through the southern part of it the last day or so. If you know anything of hurricanes and how they rotate, you might know that the heaviest rainfall occurs on the North and East ends of these things with the rainfall spreading hundreds of miles in both directions. It lined up perfectly with my area and we got about 8 to 10 inches of rain during the night.

About an hour before I was to walk out the door for my wonderful two days off, all hell broke loose. It had been completely dead at work prior to that. The calm, before the storm, if you will. The call that started it all was an outside electrical box shorting out and filling an apartment with smoke. Then, as people woke up to start their day, I started getting calls about water inside homes. The rain came down harder and harder and people had to start being rescued, and cars started to get stranded. Not long after the next shift arrived, all roads leading out and in to our little city had to be blocked off. I was not going to be able to leave.

Once I got dispatch safely handed over I jumped in the truck of our K9 sergeant type person and got a close up view of some of the city, which at that point pretty much resembled a lake.

Two hours after the end of my shift, I was finally able to get out of that city and start to make my way home. An hour after I started to head North, I finally walked in my door.

In 20 years, that's the first flooding I ever had to deal with as a dispatcher. It's not the first for the city because I remember one year our officers were getting people out of houses with boats that were volunteered by citizens. I was just lucky enough not to be working at the time.

The best call of the night was when a panicked citizen calls and tells me I need to do something about her house flooding. Her words, "You need to get people out here to do something about all this flooding." My words, "Ma'am, we can't make it stop raining."