Hard to believe how much rain came down today in the Phoenix area and the kind of havoc it caused. At 1 AM last night I couldn’t sleep, so I went outside for a late-night swim and the moon was still visible through a sheet of light cloud cover; I could see, however, some darker, ominous-looking clouds gathering to our southwest and heading our way. Before I called it a night I checked the local radar and saw no sign of the heavy rain they had been predicting for the past few days anywhere near us, so I turned off the lights and hit the sack.

I was jarred awake by what sounded like to me hail falling on the roof and banging against the windows and the side of the house. I looked at my clock – 2 AM – and headed out back to see some of the heaviest rain I have ever seen falling in my life, and huge drops of rain at that. It looked like a scene out of Jim Cantore’s best hurricane spots on The Weather Channel. Lightning lit up the sky in all directions and the thunder grumbled almost non-stop. While the thunderstorm wasn’t overhead, to see the rain fall that heavily in the ghostly light created by the lightning was something to behold.

Around 4 AM there were two booms of thunder that sounded like a cannon was fired just outside our bedroom window. It was still raining hard then, and the rain was still steady when we got up at 7:30 AM. By then I could check out the AZFamily.com website to see what was going on out in the Valley, and there were some amazing images being shown.

Most of our backyard was under water, but I’ve seen it worse than this:

…of course, that was back in the days before my Tiki bar boardwalk, which as you can see is fairly underwater.

Three hours later, the only water remaining was on the lower spots on a couple of boards. It was “>a historic day in terms of rain in Phoenix, but all in all the Richard hacienda made it through without anyone having to man the lifeboats. Now comes the fun part: seeing over the next few days just how well the boardwalk held up with all that water.