A week after I was camping in the Finger Lakes National Forest in 2018, they got nearly a foot of rain in one hour from a freak thunderstorm. Precipitable water in the air is up significantly in recent years, and if the conditions are right – you can dump a lot of rain out of sky – far more than infrastructure is designed to handle. It only takes six inches of quickly moving water to float automobiles down a hill, and if you get a a foot of rain in an hour, it’s easy to get such accumulations on roads.

And let us not forget the Halloween 2019 storm that devastated Piseco-Powley Road and many others in the Southern Adirondacks. It took them almost a year to fully rebuild whole sections of the road after that freak storm that dropped a 8 inches of rain in an hour, taking out a bridge built in 1904. The gentle rains of yesterday are becoming a memory.