RAINY DAY MATHEMATICS - I never tire of finding the strange, the bizarre and the unusual stories of our past. They are all true, or at least I think they are. You decide. A record tropical storm rainfall on June 2-3, 2007 posed some interesting questions.
Though the daily record was officially set on January 19, 1943 at 7.13 inches of rain, the official rainfall from the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry was 6.90 inches measured in the rain gauge at the 911 Center. Radar instruments measured 8 inches or more along a stretch of eastern Laurens County. Along the Savannah Road area, the instruments estimated that more than 10 inches fell to the scorched Earth.
The total rainfall measured more than all of the rain from February through May and erased a 7-inch deficit in a matter of a day.
Did you ever think how much that rain weighs or how much volume such a rainfall would fill? A seven-inch rainfall evenly spread over the entire 813 square miles of Laurens County would weigh 4,776,470,300 pounds or the equivalent weight of 310,156 average African male elephants or 25,165,805 average American male adults.
The water would fill a swimming pool with the area of a football field to a depth of 1645 feet or nearly one-third of a mile, more than 5000 average size homes or a canal, seven feet deep and forty feet wide, for a distance of 621.04 miles.
It would fill the Empire State Building twenty times or both of the felled World Trade Center Towers six times. If you want to know how many gallons that is, it is 57,271,820.
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