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After waxing poetic Friday afternoon on the pleasing visual provided by a Miami thunderstorm, things took a dramatic turn.

As you can see from The Miami Herald Article, the run-of-the-mill thunder storm turned into a miniature apocalypse, far more like an ad hoc tropical storm. While I didn’t see it, there were reports of pea-sized hale, of wind gusts up to 50 miles per hour, and, as I came to find out shortly after my blog post, of flash floods. The Miami Herald article offers a rather understated description of the storms:

On Friday, afternoon downpours dumped more than nine inches over Miami Beach in only five hours, causing flooding, power outages and massive traffic jams during rush hour

Massive traffic jams? Try thousands of people–including yours truly–sitting on the same spot of the road for hours. In my case, I burned through nearly half a tank of gas and managed to crawl a whopping 10 feet along 5th Street between Alton Road and Meridian Avenue in nearly four treacherous hours. There was so much water on 5th Street from Jefferson Avenue to Alton Road that no one, save the public buses (perhaps the first time in my life I actually wish I had been on a MetroBus) and an increasing line of tow trucks, could move. Others were trapped on the other side of the island, sitting idle on the MacArthur Causeway for many interminable hours.

I was fortunate that I had filled my tank with enough fuel and that I had parked my car on a street that didn’t take eight inches of water. Had that not been the case, I surely would have been one of those unfortunate souls who were desperately scooping Starbucks cups of water out of their car interiors. Others were clearly overambitious with their cars, thinking their small sedans could wade through waist-deep water. Instead, they ended up flooding their engines. Eventually, enough cars cleared the way so I could turn around, head back east, navigate north, bypass the flooding on Alton Road and Collins Avenue, and, finally, rejoice that I was able to take the 195 before gashing my own eyes out. I have never been so happy to see US-1 in my life. I should also probably apologize to my boyfriend, who endured my hourly diatribes laden with expletives, and to my parents, who received a very frazzled phone call from me at around hour 4 of the ordeal: “DAD, I AM STUCK ON THIS ISLAND AND I CANNOT GET OFF.”

Personal trauma aside, I am astounded at how poorly prepared the City of Miami Beach was for this. I’ll forgive the stressed out police officer who gave me  a rather snarky reply when I called to find out why I was not moving (“Don’t you SEE what’s going on?” No, sir. If I had known, I would not have called, but thanks). But according to NBC 6 News, some residents were complaining about a smell, thinking it might be sewage water that seeped up and flooded the streets. As the article states, a Miami Beach official had this to say:

“What we experienced yesterday was a phenomenon that we haven’t seen in 100 years. There was so much rain that the drainage systems backed up.”

She also said that many of the catch basins ended up blocked with debris, contributing to the flooding.

And that nasty smell that has residents believing they were swimming in sewer water?

“It’s basically muck,” she said. “It’s compost. Miami Beach was landfilled with compost to expand it, so that is what you’re smelling.”

Either way, I wonder just how this could have been so unprecedented. We get far more powerful, rainy hurricanes in this area on a pretty regular basis. This is just the start of the storm season. While people were fairly amicable toward one another–what else could we do?–the official response was pretty lackluster. I don’t understand, for instance, why there was no one redirecting traffic toward dry land after some of the water had eventually subsided on Washington Avenue. Thousands of people sat in their cars with no idea what was going on. So much for “hurricane preparedness.”