With all the rain we received in the month of June, the Saylorville Reservoir overflowing it’s emergency spillway was inevitable. Here’s a few pics from around the Des Moines Metro showing the increased water levels in the Des Moines River.
After a morning MCS rolled through the area, I honestly wasn’t expecting much of anything this evening. Apparently I was wrong!
Listening to the skywarn net on the way home, I heard a storm was quickly developing west of Knoxville about 40 miles. Once home, I checked the radar and what do ya know..It was moving directly East! I quickly gathered the gear and headed out the door.
I decided to head south and try to view the storm from the always popular south side of it. I managed to get to the intersection of Marion County road G-76 and state Hwy 14 before it arrived. The lighting was great and man were the skies dark! Just then another Tornado Warning went out for this baby. I backtracked a couple of miles and then stopped to snap a few still pics. The shelf cloud was awesome!
I then traveled back to the SE to stay ahead of it. Apparently it was no longer going 30 knots, as it quickly caught up with me. Once in Albia,Iowa; I turned west on Hwy 34 and decided to head home as it was a linear type storm and starting to bow out.
Final thoughts: It was nice to be home for a change when a storm came a knockin’! (I’m usually off chasing somewhere else when things hit near the homestead)
As many of you know, Iowa has received a great deal of rain within the past week. Many locations in Central / Southern Iowa are up over 8″ of rain for the month of June so far.
While running some other errands, I stopped in Des Moines at Waterworks park and snapped a few pics of the flooding going on from the Raccoon River. We’re not quite in the same situation we were in earlier this year with flooding, but if it keeps up, we’ll once again be keeping a weary eye on the rivers and levees.
A late side note — A day after I posted these pics on my Flickr account, the Editors at Flickr HQ picked a couple of them for their flash flooding gallery. Here’s a link to their gallery.
Click to enlarge
