A quotation attributed to Mark Twain says that everyone always talks about the weather but no one ever does anything about it. Of course, the scaremongers of global warming think they can do something about it, but that’s not our subject here.

The subject of this post is very definitely reality: the flooding that has inundated Texas for the last several weeks. One statistic I recently read says that 35 trillion gallons of rain have fallen here since the first of May. Stated another way, it’s enough water to cover the entire state of Texas to a depth of almost nine inches.

Nine inches deep from Texarkana and Beaumont to El Paso and from Texline to Boca Chica. That’s a mind-boggling amount of water.

Before all this rain hit, most parts of Texas were struggling to deal with a four-year drought. Farmers had missed several crops. Ranchers had been thinning their herds because there wasn’t enough grass for their cattle to eat.

Lakes all over the state were drying up. Lake Travis, a huge lake west of Austin, was a shadow of its former self. Lakes Palo Pinto and Hubbard Creek were almost totally dry, their mud beds filled with huge cracks. Marinas and boat docks throughout the state sat high and dry, far away from the waterline.

Small towns all over the state struggled to supply their citizens with water. The city of Wichita Falls actually began mixing recycled sewer water into its municipal water supply.

Most of those lakes that were drying up are now above flood stage. The marinas and docks that stood high and dry are now completely submerged. Most lakes ban boat traffic until the flooding subsides.

The first photo above is the Colorado River in Austin, swollen with overflow from Lake Travis, which a few months ago was predicted to be dry by 2016. The middle photo shows a road leading to Lake Lewisville which is closed due to high water. The third one shows stranded cars in San Marcos, flooded by the Blanco River, which is normally a fairly small stream.

It would be nice if Al Gore and other self-appointed experts who preach that all our weather ills would clear up if we quit driving cars could figure out how to spread all this rainfall out and eliminate the droughts and floods. Somehow, I doubt that is going to happen.

What weather extremities have impacted you or your loved ones?

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Writers may not have it all together, but together we have it all.

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For more information about David N. Walker, click the “About” tab above.

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Contact him at dnwalkertx (at) gmail (dot) com or tweet him at @davidnwalkertx.