Denver’s heavy rains, measured in illegal barrels

It’s been raining a lot in Denver. On the extreme off-chance that you need hard numbers to believe it, the average total rainfall for June 12 in Denver is 7 inches, but this year’s total so far is a whopping 21 inches according to the Denver Science Museum’s weather station in City Park.

Another way to measure the deluge is in residential rain barrels, which are illegal in Colorado despite efforts this past session to allow Coloradans two 50-gallon tanks.

If the barrels were legal, a person with a roof measuring 20 feet by 30 feet could have filled 160 of them this year and nearly ten just today.

In what is anything but a barrel of laughs, those proverbial drops in the bucket, along with many, many more, are filling up bloated waterways and washing out roads across the state instead.

 

 

Flashback to flash flooding, Denver’s Cherry Creek in 1933. Public domain via WaterArchives.org