Another tale of Rochester, Minnesota, home of the World Famous Mayo Clinic: They were lucky to get the fireworks show in on July 4, 1978, as it had been raining pretty much every day for the past two weeks. The ground was saturated with water. But the show went on, a very typical 4th of July display.
The next day on the 6PM weather report the forecast was for a 30% chance of showers. It ended up raining 7 inches in 6 hours. It was raining so hard we weren't sure whether to go upstairs to flee the rising water or go to the basement to escape a possible tornado. You know how a typical thunderstorm has a really heavy part where it rains a lot for about 20 minutes? That's how hard it rained for 6 hours. The water was knee-deep in the streets by 10PM and was coming up to the sidewalk. Finally, since we were exhausted and our bedroom was on the second floor of the house, we decided to go to bed about 1AM. It seemed like the worst was over.
Sure enough, we woke up about 7AM to blue skies, chirping birds, and absolutely beautiful morning. Our street was bone dry, no evidence of the storm from the night before. We turned on the radio (KWEB 1290AM) and the DJ was talking about some kind of flood. At first we thought it must be in Atlanta (why? I don't know) or the Twin Cities or somewhere like that. No, they were talking about the city where we were, Rochester, Minnesota! Now, you must understand Rochester was only about 55,000 people at that time, not a large city at all. The more they talked, the more I couldn't believe it.
So I went outside. People were walking their dogs, doing normal summer stuff. That is, on my street they were. Four blocks to the east, people were indeed navigating through their neighborhood via canoe. The contrast between those few blocks was something I'll never forget.
Five people died in that flood. One was a lady who drove her car off of a washed-out bridge at night. The other four were in a nursing home on the first floor, and the attendant wanted to make sure they were out of harm's way, so they put them on the elevator to take them all up to the second floor. Except the elevator shorted out due to the flood water, and the elevator went down to the basement, where they all drowned. If they had just stayed where they were, they all would have been fine. My first lesson of the Cruelty of Fate. And to this day, whenever I hear a forecast for 30% chance of showers, I take it with a grain of salt.
