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Yesterday’s down-pour, flooding, lightning and thunder that rattled buildings reminded me of a tropical storm I was suddenly caught in while visiting friends in Mississippi along the Gulf of Mexico about a 30 minute drive from New Orleans in 1999. I am not sure of the name of the highway, but there is a coastal highway that runs along the Gulf of Mexico in Mississippi and a section of it leaves land and stretches across the Gulf in bridge-like fashion. Only it’s not that high up off the water like a bridge is, it’s low to the water giving the visual affect of driving across an ocean. We were driving along this highway on our way back to our friends house after a day of sight seeing when suddenly the skies opened up with a tropical down-pour the likes of which I’ve never seen being from California where we have mostly nice weather all the time. The rain was so thick you couldn’t see a foot in front of the car. There was nowhere to pull over and wait it out because we were on a bridge. And if that wasn’t bad enough… the waters in the Gulf of Mexico started to rise with the down-pour, the bridge seemed to get smaller and smaller and felt like it would be swallowed up at any moment by a tropical storm with a bad name (their storms are big enough to be named by the national weather departments). It was very scary! The only thing we could do was keep driving. We drove as quickly as we could following cars with Mississippi plates hoping they would know what to do. When we finally reached land again, we pulled over for a few minutes to catch our breath thankful that we had made it across what before we thought was a cool bridge. We then tried to navigate our way through flooded streets. Has anyone seen the traffic light system they have in Mississippi? Working for an engineering firm where we design streets as part of our job… I will tell you-- Mississippi traffic light systems are one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Their lights are strung on power lines across the intersections, almost reminiscent of San Francisco cable car wires. They do not work well in a tropical storm where lightning is striking the road. I began to wonder if we’d ever make it to our friend’s house… We are lucky that we don’t have tropical storms like that all the time. Yesterday’s downpour was reminiscent but nothing like it in comparison.
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