Here, we are cut off from town. The two underpasses below the train line are full of water. The wheelbarrow in the yard is full, showing how much rain we’ve gotten, and the yard is a lake. At least, we bought groceries and cat food yesterday. And eeuu will be happy to know we have provisions of wine and beer 
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I did not give my usual aviso to stock up assuming that most know the drill by now.
But the booz part, yeah glad that was not forgotten.
¡Viva La Niña!
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Seen some houses surrounded by water…very bad news.
Rivers and lakes rose higher than I have seen pretty much ever. The levels dropped down significantly over the last week with nice break from the worst of the rain, but sopping heavy bucketful rain has def started again and forecast has it to be continous next 5 days. 
Had a nice break from the rain in the south the last few weeks. Even a stretch of sunny days quite often. Last monday it was 20c which was just beautiful with full sun.
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In La Serena we are experiencing our second day of proper rain this year. Its only of average intensity, but as usual the locals are treating it like a catastrophe. The streets are empty because Public transport, ie Buses and Colectivos has almost completely vanished. In its place, the Police and Military are having to provide transport to outlying areas.
Pathetic.
Our public transit disappeared during the pandemic and has yet to get back to anywhere close to pre-pandemic levels. It sucks for my husband. He used to be able to take a pretty direct bus to work if he didn’t want to drive. He’s tried the train, but it’s usually completely full by the time it gets to us. He has to take it to the south, two stations and then switch to the train going north. The municipal government announced that they will run buses to help the problem, but I have yet to see one.
The wind last night was crazy! At least we don’t have old trees too close to the house and our electrical wires are underground. I guess the only thing that could fall over here is a lamp post.
Had a whopper of a storm Wednesday and Thursday and had to drive a couple hundred km in the tail end of it. We were in a hotel that was mostly not part of the storm or outages and I had checked the weather at our destination (home) and was only expecting a thunderstorm to start once we got home…but I should have checked further afield.
So Thursday morning we are set to checkout and then i realise the storm came early and is much more massive than I realized with gusts up to 90km/h so we try to extend our hotel stay another night rather than drive in high winds but there were no rooms available that night so we went for it.
I was shocked at trees that had ripped up portions of the sidewalk concrete around the trees that were the size of a vw bug! Usually the wind near our home maxes out at 35km/h which already feels like a tornado from the inside, but this was another level.
While about 20% of the way home the maps navigation app tells us we can save some time by taking a side highway due to heavy congestion on the main highway that is obviously a smorgasbord of accidents, down trees, and power lines so we take the advice of the app and switch off to a 2 lane highway to bypass. My wife is saying uhhh maybe we should just stay on the main highway? Im thinking…the app will save us time, it knows all the things 
As we proceed a few km we get to a hand full of cars, a rural school bus, and a police car stopped and see a down tree. No congestion registers on the app on this side highway…so either not monitored or not enough cars to trigger it. The police had a chainsaw and were cutting up a down tree across the road so we waited about 10 min and then the road was clear and the police zoomed through and the vehicles followed.
Then another down tree. And again the police jump out with chainsaw and set to clearing it and then zoomed through
Not kidding, this went on 5 or 6 times! And were only half way through this side highway to get back to the main highway. The one benefit is the side highway didn’t have power lines but as we waited for the police to clear the tree i was concerned another tree might fall on us as we waited
Eventually the police hit a down set of tree that was just overwhelming. They were already tired from the previous half dozen of massive trees already cleared and we realised this latest set of trees would take a LONG time to clear if it was even possible for a single chainsaw and probably actually needed a tractor or dozer to do it.
So we turned around and went back to the main highway and now all the main highway trees and powerlines and accidents were just cleared up so we were able to not have to wait continued on the trip without any other delays but clearly saw so many road areas that had certainly had intervention done to clear trees and power lines
We figured we basically just ended up waiting on the side highway versus the main highway but the amount of time was probably about the same minus the powerline risks.
A lot of lessons learned 
Wow. Scary stuff! I’m glad everyone is okay.