Wrath of the Truckee

One of the problems with living in a desert is that on the rare occasion that you do get a lot of rain, it's not easy to handle. The Truckee River, which runs through Reno (right by my home in fact, but don't worry, I'm on the 8th floor), is already running high from a very wet December, and this weekend two more storms are going to slam into the Sierra. In the nearby city of Sparks they're talking about filling sandbags, and it's just been announced that the flood stage alert level on the Truckee has been bumped up to Level Orange. Whatever that means.

Of course, we don't have it as bad as the folks on the other side of the hill. The city of Sacramento has already set up a couple of sand bag distribution points in anticipation of the coming storms. The one saving grace in all of this is that so far is the fact that because the storms we had in December and those scheduled for the weekend are each a textbook example of a "Pinapple Express" (warm, wet systems that move up out of the tropical Pacific), the temperature has not been cold enough to give us snow in the valleys. I'm grateful for this not so much for myself--personally I like a good snowfall--but for this city, which was brought to a grinding halt by last year's already legendary January snowstorm. Right now all we have to worry about is liquid water, at least for the time being.