On my personalized Google home page I have a Weather widget configured to display front-and-center. Each time I have opened my browser over the past few days I’ve been facing a weather forecast for Seoul that reads ‘Light Rain’. I invite the meteorologist who wrote that to come and visit Seoul for the next few days.
Right now Korea’s monsoon season is in full swing. If you’ve never experienced it, I envy you. For my first several years in Korea, each monsoon season was predictable. The rain usually started falling somewhere between the end of June and the beginning of July. It would last for two weeks. I don’t mean that it would rain off-and-on for two weeks - it would rain near continuously for two weeks. There might be a break of an hour or two in different areas, but rarely more than that. Rivers would flood all over the country, including the Han River that runs through Seoul. One of the bridges over the Han has two levels and the bottom level would flood out every year. Several streets in Seoul would become flooded in different areas. One side of a particularly busy stretch of a boulevard in southern Seoul would always flood because the street has a slant to it that you normally don’t notice.
Over the past few years the monsoons have been anything but predictable. The 1998 monsoon was the worst I have seen since I’ve been here. A large number of people died that year and a great many more suffered severe property damage. Since then we’ve had several monsoons that were lighter than normal. One year in particular, I believe it was 2001 or 2002, was so dry that the government was predicting water shortages. Even though the monsoons, when there is enough rain to cause flooding, will usually bring death and destruction to some degree, they are vital to avoid drought. Korea gets a large perentage of her total rainfall during the monsoon, so if there is little rain it can potentially be devastating.
This year has been fairly wet. Even the spring was wetter than usual. In the winter, we even had more precipitation than we normally do (which was, thankfully, mostly in the form of snow since it was also one of the coldest winters in recent years). So although the monsoon came a little late this year, it has hit us pretty hard. For the past several days the television news has been filled with scenes of flooding, mudslides, washed out (and sometimes washed away) bridges, and emergency personnel rescuing people who had become trapped in dangerous areas, and news of rain-related deaths, injury and property damage.
So I invite any meteorologist who has forecast ‘Light Rain’ for Seoul over the past week to come join us and experience what ‘Light Rain’ really isn’t.
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