LAKEFRONT PROPERTY

 Some of the people in our neighborhood could claim last month that they had "lakefront property." It doesn't rain much in the Yuma, AZ area but when it does the water often has no place to go. In this case the rain storms that hit the area on September 9 turned a recreation area into a lake. I say "rain storms" because it was reported that three separate storms came together in the Foothills area with heavy rain and strong winds. It was very much like the microbursts seen elsewhere. The winds were so strong that they knocked down 17 electric poles supplying electricity to the area. It took APS two days to replace the poles and get the power back on. It was an uncomfortable two days in the dark with no air conditioning to cool down the temperatures in the triple digits. There was a big run on ice to try and keep food stuffs cooled during the outage. Some people even didn't have water because pumps were also without power. The winds knocked down a large commercial billboard nearby and played a scary trick on neighbors up the street. Their house backs up to another housing area with a wall separating the two. The wind picked up a metal shed three houses down on the other side of the wall and left it crumpled up again the back of their house. The storms came on the tail end of the monsoon season in Arizona. Phoenix usually gets bad storms but Yuma usually gets just dark clouds. Not this time.