I woke up on the morning of June 11th from a rough night of sleep. There were some really bad thunderstorms that rolled through, and that was all I knew. I’d woken up a couple of times due to the noise, but nothing else. I sat with my morning coffee doing my puzzles (my brain exercises to get it in gear) until my daughter woke up and told me there was no school. Why was there no school? Apparently, we’d had a much worse storm than I’d realized.

My little town of Madison, NH was apparently ground zero for a deluge. We had numerous roads washed out, including the main road into town from where I live. Side roads were bad, too. Luckily, we are able to go north and west from our house into Conway and North Conway, but south/east into Madison and other places was cut off.

Official totals put the rainfall at around 4 1/2 inches. Locals with weather stations were reporting more than 7 inches! Silver Lake was reported by the police department to have gained 2 FEET of water overnight, and some of the boats moored in the lake were in trouble.

In daylight, it was worse. Just beyond our development, Route 113, the major road through the area is washed out. In 2023, there were storms that took out part of the road. They’d spent a lot of money installing large rocks along the side of the road to try to prevent these types of washouts. It all failed on Wednesday night. They are having an emergency town meeting today to discuss what to do with the road now. It being a small town, these expenses put a lot onto the local taxpayers. Maybe if we still had a functioning government and could get a disaster declaration, FEMA would help, but that ship apparently has sailed.

This morning, I woke up to news that school is still closed since the school is cut off from those of us slightly north of town. This means the bus service to the middle school and high school in Conway isn’t available, although those schools remain open. We already had one idiot go around the barriers in the picture above and end up stuck. Because, of course, ROAD CLOSED doesn’t mean them.

This is the only damage we have. We had our parking area built out last fall. Between the old and the new area the runoff took out some of the fill. We’ll have to have someone put some rocks in this spot and then add fill to the spot. I’m not complaining, it’s a small issue compared to what so many others are facing.