the rix mix

Gotta feel for people who get flooded. Not so much for people who insist on living as "river rats" & are basically gambling with their property, but for those in areas where floods have been historically uncommon, yet were just hit again before they'd even recovered from the previous deluge. My apartment building in Rahway NJ flooded twice in three years. I was on the second floor. It began as trickle into the parking lot & within minutes became a torrent, collapsing a retaining wall next to the river. Less than a foot of water got into the first floor, but it ruined the carpets, furniture & wall molding, & left a layer of stinky sticky mud. The water was upstream road runoff. Both of those floods damaged the library; the second ruined it permanently. Fortunately, the other branch of the Rahway River has a flood zone next to it through most of the city, & the Army Corps of engineers built huge levees downtown after some devastating floods in the 1950s. In the 90s, the city condemned & bought a few remaining flood prone houses on that branch, tore them down & replaced them with - empty land. All Jersey communities along the lower reaches of rivers & streams just have to take whatever garbage & toxic ingredients heavy rains bring downstream.