What If It Rained and Couldn't Stop?

A grey October afternoon in a small town under a mountain. It starts to drizzle, and it never stops. It only gets heavier. The road becomes a river, the drain cover is thrown up on a fountain, your car floats away down the street, and the water comes in under your front door. You shut it; the water squeezes round it, the chairs float, the power goes, and the door bursts open. Up the stairs, into the bedroom, into the dinghy that has been blown up since the summer, and out through your own window. Then the roofs go under, the night comes, the church spire goes, and the water climbs the hills and the mountain, past the world's cities, all but the highest, until only the summit is left. What is real: the rain categories (light, moderate, heavy, violent) and every rain record on screen: 305 mm in one hour (Holt, Missouri, 1947), 31.2 mm in one minute (Unionville, Maryland, 1956), 1,825 mm in a day (Foc-Foc, La Réunion, 1966) and 26,461 mm in a year (Cherrapunji, India, 1860-61). 15 cm of fast water can knock you over and 30 cm can carry a car away (US National Weather Service). All the water in the sky at once would make only about 2.5 cm of rain. Raindrops break apart before they grow much past 4.5 mm. Lightning heats the air to about 30,000 °C, five times hotter than the surface of the Sun. If all the ice on Earth melted the sea would rise about 70 m. Every city height is real: Amsterdam −2 m, London 14 m, Tokyo 17 m, Cairo 22 m, Paris 34 m, Beijing 44 m, Moscow 124 m, New Delhi 210 m, Madrid 667 m, Brasília 1,079 m, Kathmandu 1,400 m, Denver 1,609 m, Nairobi 1,795 m, Mexico City 2,240 m, Addis Ababa 2,355 m, Bogotá 2,625 m, Quito 2,850 m, Cusco 3,399 m, La Paz 3,640 m, El Alto 4,150 m, La Rinconada 5,100 m, the highest town on Earth. What is not real, or made up: rain that never stops, and rain harder than the records; where all that water could come from (nobody knows: there isn't that much water); the town, its street, its church and its mountain (the summit 4,800 m above your street); how fast the water rises; and the very last thing that happens. You sat in a dinghy for nine minutes and watched the rain drown the world. CHAPTERS 0:00 The last rock 0:10 The window 0:38 The street 1:10 The car 1:26 Inside 2:20 Upstairs 2:47 The dinghy 3:29 The rooftops 4:05 The night 4:59 The hills 6:06 The world 7:00 The mountain 8:00 ??? HASHTAGS #whatif #rain #flood #science #weather