Flash Floods
It was raining hard, real hard. As my girlfriend and I were sitting at home on my day off from The Day, the two of us cuddled in blankets watching rain smack the sliding glass doors, the last thing I thought of doing, or wanted to do, was go outside. But when my dad, who works at the aquarium, called me almost in tears telling me his car was half submerged in rain and drainage water, along with an entire parking lot of other cars, I immediately threw on about five layers of clothes, grabbed my camera, and was off. When I got to the aquarium parking lot, my jaw dropped as the first thing I saw were two tourist scooping buckets of brown water out of their Porche. “It won’t start,” they told me in a monotone voice. I pulled out my reporter’s pad and jotted down their quote, until, ten seconds later, my reporter’s pad was about as dry as my rain-jacket. Shit.
Hours later, I had accumulated hundreds of shots, but literally not a single one of them had any emotion or reactions captured. Frustrated in myself, I finally stopped and looked around, realizing there were no emotions to be captured. People were just standing there, just looking out at a sea of sunken cars as if they were watching a boring TV show or the trees swaying in the wind. Shocked. I decided to shift my attention to the employees who were showing lots of emotion. Actually, they were having the time of their lives! “This is the best day of work ever!”, I remember several of them saying as they swam in the oil infested waters. Although they were having their fun, it was well deserved, because for maybe four or five hours, they worked non-stop pushing peoples’ vehicles to dryer areas of the parking lot. Their professionalism and kindness was appreciated all around.
Below is the “winner” image from my take. I was actually really disappointed by my results, but in a way I was happy I was. It’s easy to flip through those “Photos of the Day” that are on different news sites and criticize each image, saying, “Man that photographer was at an earthquake or a flood or a fire and all they could get was that crappy photo!” In reality, sometimes the most seemingly easiest events are the hardest places to make good images. I guess my flash flood experience was a time to learn that first hand. In the end, the photo below ran on a few of those “Photos of the Day” sites that I always am so hard on. Irony!
Mystic Aquarium employee Emily McCabe attempts to move a visitors flooded car to a dry area of the aquarium’s parking lot on Wed. July 1, 2009. McCabe was one of dozens of employees who spent several hours helping visitors retrieve their cars, some of which were more than half submerged in rain and drainage water. (Tucker Walsh / The Day)
