A Surprise of Flood

The thing about living close to nature, is that occasionally it tries to rub you out. The odd snowstorm I wrote about lasted one single day. Then the snow turned to rain and it kept raining until just now. The result being that we have had some serious flooding around here. I didn't expect to be sandbagging at work today, but that's what I did. At least for a little bit. There is this lovely creek and wetland that winds its way lazily through our office park in Bothell. It's a place for birds to nest (I saw a bald eagle last week!) and a place for salmon to spawn. It's also a channel for run-off. The berm around it is high enough so that the water never nears its top which is a delightful paved trail- until today.

We were told to evacuate our buildings around 10am and volunteers were asked to stay and help with the sandbags. I had a project to complete, so after a few sandbags I got wet enough and I went home to work. At first I wished that I could have stayed and helped, but it's just as well. Around 4:30 the battle to keep the lights on at our datacenter in Bothell was lost and it went dark. Utility power failed, and our diesel generator was swamped as its transformers blew- many millions upon millions of dollars of equipment, which should never sleep, fell silent. The 40 guys who remained on site put up a valiant effort, but there they fought a losing battle. In case you don't know what a data center is, it's a very expensive building with hundreds if not thousands of computers in it. It takes two days to turn it back on properly because of the complexity of the technology involved. Thankfully, we have a handful of these sprinkled in secret places across the country so that no more than one ever fails due to some catastrophic event.

The city of Bothell has no more "road closed" signs to deploy. The flooding is too wide-spread. I don't know the entire extent of the damage since it's advised to not go out. I'm anxious to find out how the guys got out of there tonight, or if they are still fighting to keep water out of our building. At least it's a pleasant 55F out, so it's not as bad as it could be! That really is the perfect temperature to bag sand.