I live in Philadelphia. This morning I woke up to the sound of buckets of rain and a frenzied wind-driven tree dance out my apartment window. Turning on the radio I learned that this was only the outer band effects of Hurricane Sandy. The real bad stuff would hit later in the afternoon and last for perhaps 18 hours.
Something else would come after that, however, something not much mentioned along with the downed trees and power outages and coastal flooding. Something related to this autumn season. Storm drain blockages and their aftermath.
Also outside my window this late October morning were leaves. Lots and lots and lots of leaves. Some piled up by the actions of those horrible leaf blowers. Most just covering every other inch of sidewalks and long runs along street curbs.
Where do leaves like this go after ordinary rainstorms in this season of the year? Are they picked up by garbage trucks? Blown into the ocean? Collected by squirrels who come out of the trees pushing little wheelbarrows which they brush full of leaves with their bushy little tails and cart off to landfills? I don’t know. I’m a city guy. Leaves are there after it rains, then they aren’t.
With a storm like this, though, I know where they will go. They will be pushed into storm drains that are supposed to collect excess water from city streets and pipe it to waterways in order to prevent street flooding. And because of the quantity of uncollected leaves now in place these drains are going to be clogged soon and the streets in my town, and a lot of others, are going to be awash.
Awash not only with rotting and slippery leaves but with dog doo residue and all the other filth that always covers city streets. And when this flooding goes down, everything it covered is going to be covered with a slim residue — a variant of what covered much of New Orleans after Katrina.
That’s the post-Sandy Frankenslime horror I’m thinking I’m going to be seeing here in a few days. Not the worst outcome of the storm, maybe. But perhaps one of the most long lasting and insidious.