Feast or famine

Mostly famine when referring to the amount of rain out in Sierra Blanca.  The last three days have yielded 2.8 inches of rain, which puts it ahead of the normal rainfall for the entire month.

This raises some issues:

• How to collect so much water at one time?  If 1000 sq. ft are used for rainwater collection, this means that up to 1736 gallons could have been collected over the past 3 days!  The math?  6.2 gals for every 100 sq.ft. per tenth of an inch times 10 times 28 equals 1736.  
• The area is quite dry usually.  What happens when there's so much rain?  I'm concerned about erosion.
• What about localized flooding?  Surely, some folks could get stranded out there for awhile while the water recedes.

Seventeen hundred gallons means 31 55 gallon drums would have to be deployed and in short order.  You'd be overwhelmed.  Some system would have to be in place that could gather this much water in such a short time.  But most of the time, it wouldn't be used as it doesn't rain very much over there.

A new set of problems to consider.


Either you have no water or you have too much.  How to spread this out evenly over time?

Update:

Water problem?  It looks more and more likely that this problem can be solved.  What water problems that I do have will be short term.  For example, water is likely to collect into ponds which can be harvested for water.  There's likely to be hundreds of gallons that can be harvested this way.  It's just a matter of harvesting the water and transporting it to where it is needed.

Update ( 7/18/14):

It is necessary to point out that there was some error or sorts in the webpage that reported the rainfall.  It is about an inch less than reported.  Still a lot by their standards.

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Southern California?  How bout Sierra Blanca?  Seems the same.

Update:

I'm adding this to my going off the grid series.

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