Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink .

It rained softly, but persistently throughout the night, nothing unusual for our small town.
Then early, roundabout 5.30am, it started to develop into a torrential rain, and soon we realised that it was close to a cloudburst, if not. It kept on  gushing down with intermittent lightning strikes, thunder and all the trimmings of a good old fashioned rainstorm.
This lasted for an hour and a half and we knew that the rest of our town must be in a shambles, flooded, a real disaster.
Soft rain kept falling for the rest of the day.
Soon pictures and images, videos were posted by the inhabitants on cell phones showing various stages of damage, disaster and total destruction. It looked very dire and it was evident that much damage had occured.
Houses were inundated with water; water streamed right through, garden walls tumbled down due to the water pressure and built up from  the neighbour's property . . . Streets became rivers, and people scrambled to get out of harms' way.
Some areas became so inundated that cars (empty, I hope) disappeared beneath the water level. Lids/covers came off manholes in the streets, and even the storm drainage system could not cope anymore.

Our property is situated such that the water drainage is fairly efficient, and all we had to 'show' for this cloudburst (135mm within a short period) is a line on a garden wall which shows the height the water level reached in our garden. Nothing much, considering how other properties became devasted and completely flooded.

Then the next problem, our waterpumping station that supplied fresh water to the whole of our town, became defunct. So, the municipality supplied water via tankers that parked in the different suburbs . . . if you had a big enough container, you could get water for coffee/tea.

So life is, the unexpected can turn a Monday morning upside down . . .