Wettest. May. Ever.

May started wet and had continued thus. Last year, a bit of rain in May was blessed relief. Now, we facing a natural disaster. Floods, when they occur in Poland, happen in July (statistically the year's wettest month) and August (second wettest). Here we are in what should be the merry month of May, and we've had vast amounts of rain.

Above: Sunday evening, and I'm driving Moni to choir practice at the Dominican Abbey in Służew. The two nearside lanes of ul. Puławska are flooded. According to the Physics Institute of Warsaw Technical University, we had five and half litres of rain per square metre between four and five pm that day. Below: field across the road from our house, this morning.

After a record amount of snow melted, causing the water table to reach high levels, the record amound of May rainfall has had nowhere to go but to the surface. Pretty much every field under crop on Jeziorki right now has at least some flooded patches. Below: potato field on ul. Nawłocka. The farmer lost his crop last summer because of flooding, and now this.

Below: W-wa Jeziorki's proto-Park+Ride. Between ul. Gogolińska and the station, the field is submerged. Unbelievable when you compare to this photo from October 2008. Looking at that picture, you would never describe this patch of land as being flood-prone!


With weather like this, the bike stays at home. Getting all dressed up in waterproofs over office clothes leads to sweatiness, stickiness and odour and we have no showers at work. Right: cyclepath in Powiśle, entirely submerged. It's so wet I wear wellies just to get from home to W-wa Jeziorki station. There's still no pavement along ul. Karczunkowska, it's impossible to get from home to the station in normal footwear without getting my feet wet.
The weather forecasters say it will stay wet. A huge low hangs immobile over Ukraine, stretching out across most of Poland. Heavy rain is expected overnight, showers tomorrow, then more rain on Thursday and Friday.

Who's to blame? Why, Premier Tusk of course. And presidential candidate Bronisław Komorowski. For these men have singularly failed to predict the rain or indeed do anything to stop it. (© TVP1 2010)