For the past week, the weather forecast has been predicting heavy rain on Wednesday/Thursday - and they were right! A few drops fell on Tuesday evening but these were just the preliminaries. It started raining, not particularly heavily, on Wednesday morning, but this cleared up after a few hours, and by the time I drove home in the afternoon, one wouldn't have known that there had been rain at all.
At around 7pm, rain started to fall ... and fall ... and fall. When the news wasn't concerned with the US elections, it was showing pictures of two coastal towns that were already suffering from flooding (this happens every year and nothing ever seems to be done about this). There was heavy rain in our area that continued throughout the night.
At about 11:30 pm, I awoke. I'm not sure whether this was due to the sound of the rain falling on a roof or whether it was because I was having difficulty breathing - I think the latter. I took the CPAP mask off my face and then noticed that there was no sound of air rushing out of the mask; the machine didn't light up, either. In other words - a power cut. Typical: there are always problems with the electricity supply whenever it rains. A message then appeared on our mobile phones, saying that the problem was regional: not only was our entire kibbutz without electricity, the neighbouring moshav was without power either.
I tried to fall asleep but it was difficult, what with the noise of the rain outside and a slightly blocked nose. Eventually the power returned at about 1:30 am and I was able to sleep.
The rain had ceased at some time during the night for there was no rain when I went for my morning walk at 5:30 am. True, there were puddles everywhere, but no water running down from the hill behind us. The rain and the power cut conspired to deprive the kibbutz of internet access so I couldn't access my mail. I assume that this is going to be fixed during the day because I have an internet meeting at 15:30 in which I will participate from home.
Presumably the lack of internet access is also preventing the kibbutz secretary from informing us how much rain fell during the night.
Of course, there will be no more rain for another few weeks.
Edit: five minutes after writing the above, of course it started raining again....
Further edit: 44.5 mm rain fell during the last 24 hours on the kibbutz.
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