A few people checked in with me last week with sentiments such as “How did you and your family fare during the deluge?” and “I saw there was bad flooding out your way; hoping everything is ok.”
Yes, our house is not underwater. The basement was damp, but there was no water on the floor.
It’s rare for upstate NY news to appear on the national newscasts, but it’s been “a thing” for a few days now. There was real damage in areas not far from our home. In West Albany, which is part of the town of Colonie, but only about 2.5 miles from our house, people were evacuated by boat.
The flood-prone areas – the city line to Colonie on Central Avenue (see above), the area around Stuyvesant Plaza at Western Avenue and Fuller Road, for two – caught some drivers unawares. According to a news report, one guy drove one way on Central at 4:30 a.m., picked up a passenger, drove back, and got stuck.
From the NWS: “July 29, 2026 was the 2nd wettest calendar day on record for Albany, NY with 5.45″ occurring! The daily record missed the all-time calendar day record set by the Tropical Storm Floyd rainfall back on Sept 16, 1999 when 5.60″ occurred at the Albany International Airport. The rainfall yesterday did pass the 4.69″ measured from Irene back on August 28, 2011. Daily records for Albany go back to 1874.”
It was a fairly narrow geographic band of rain, but the places that were hit got hammered. You may have seen the centuries-old grist mill in Castleton-On-Hudson, just 10 miles south of Albany, obliterated.
Cohoes Falls is quite pleasant, but it’s no Niagara Falls, except that day.
By comparison
Do you know what I did that day? Nothing. I never left the house, didn’t get dressed.
It had been a hectic few days before that. My wife had dropped me off to visit a sick friend on the previous Friday. When I got home via bus, my wife had left her keys in the door. The next day, I couldn’t find my keys.
So I don’t know whether I lost them inside or outside the house, which made the search more exhausting. Are they in the sofa, did they fall out of my pants on the bus, or something else?
Then, when my wife and I went to the movies on Monday, I turned off my iPhone. After the film, I tried to turn on my phone, but I saw “SOS,” which meant my phone was showing that I had lost my Internet connection.
I tried multiple times: toggling Airplane Mode, turning it on for a few seconds, then off to refresh my network connection; restarting my iPhone; toggling my cellular line/eSIM off and back on in Settings; resetting Network Settings. Nothing.
The next day, my provider messaged, “You’ve turned off our service on your phone.” I didn’t, but I went to THAT setting and turned it on.
Neither losing keys (my wife made more on Tuesday) nor not being online was a real crisis, merely a bother.
But they were enough stressors that I took the rain day to do nothing.