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When I 16, a thousand years ago all the way back in 2001, my neighborhood experienced a flash flood.

My mother is bad for panicking over nothing, and we all rolled our eyes as she loaded us into the van and drove up the mountain.

It was one of the wildest things I’ve ever seen. It looked like there were waterfalls coming out of the sky around us. If someone had told me they seen something like that before I seen it, I would’ve called them a liar. But it literally would be dry in one spot and raining just a few feet away, but not normal rain. It was literally like someone was dumping a giant bucket from the sky.

The creek behind my house was instantly in my backyard. This happened as we were leaving.

Later, someone came to the store at the top of the mountain where we were sitting and told my mom that they were going to have to bring boats to get people out of our neighborhood. These big, two-story houses were underwater all the way up into the second floor.

I was so terrified, worried that all of my friends were dead. Fortunately, it didn’t take out the entire neighborhood and people were able to go up the road and take shelter in a church. Only two people died because they tried to drive through it and got sucked into the water.

The people who didn’t take it seriously had to be rescued. We spent months with shovels digging the mud from the houses when the water went back down. The whole neighborhood pitched in. Several families left and the value of the houses tanked. People were buying them for a few thousand dollars. One man from New York swept in and bought several of them and became a slumlord. He did just enough work to make them livable for 350 a month. The neighborhood was so beautiful before that, but it was forever changed. It’s a hellscape to this day.

Somehow we got very lucky. My house only got water in the back rooms and it wasn’t destructive. Everyone from the next house over and on down was ruined though.