On 01-Sep-17 10:25 AM, Jack wrote:
....

What amazes me is how little water is around after 5 FEET of rain. If
Pgh got 5 feet of rain, everything not on a mountain top would be under
100 feet of water. We got 4 INCHES of rain in an hour once, and the
valley between my house and the next mountain got a 20 foot wall of
water that killed a bunch of people, including my uncle, when their
vehicles got washed away.

Terrain makes all the difference, indeed--we were in Lynchburg, VA, when
Camille dumped 24-30+" in 8 hours overnight in 1969 in the heart of
Nelson County in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It killed some 150-160,
liquified and washed away whole small mountains and massively changed
the landscape...but, because it's all mountainous, when the surge
passed, except in the bottoms there was virtually no standing water,
just mud and debris.

Most horrible experience of my life doing recovery work in the aftermath...

--