Well, that was just delightful. Mother Nature, as is her wont (an Old English word that means habit or practice), hammered the Tucson Basketball League into submission with a rainstorm for the ages. Two of the three courts we were playing on were rendered unusable and we were only able to get in a few games before the deluge came indoors. Officially, Tucson got 1.23 inches of rain. That's at the Airport, but other parts of town (including ours) got as much as three inches. That 1.23 figure represents about 10 percent of all the rain Tucson gets in an entire year! And the previous all-time record for November 1st was .42 inches. It was one of those rare times when a hurricane formed down by the Equator and instead of heading out into the Pacific Ocean, it hugged the coast and then went into the Gulf of California. When that happens, the storm gets squeezed, it intensifies, and then heads right up the chute into Sonora and the American Southwest.
It's not the first time that we've been hit, but it's usually in the summer. One time, a nearby lightning strike knocked out the power for a few hours. A couple summers ago, a monster thunderstorm damaged the roof and sheets of rain were streaming down the interior walls. This time, it was a combination of a couple tiny leaks and a condensation problem exacerbated by a quirk in the building's heating/cooling system that caused water to appear in the playing floor. We had to shut things down as a safety measure. As always the facility's staff people did a heroic job.
We'll reschedule the games that got canceled yesterday and add all of the games that were to be played next week in a full slate for this coming Sunday. That will wrap up the regular season and then we'll start the playoffs on November 15th.
