what is your general outlook, your take on life. are you an optimist-- everything will be okay. or, are you a pessimist-- nothing good will come my way. or perhaps a realist- life is what happens while you wait. re-reading my post from 5/17, it sounded on the whole pessimistic and a bit harsh. after all it's not that a like event might not happen just about anywhere. take for instance little a-town. particularly in the older parts of the city there is no storm drainage system. being basically flat a rain such as the one that hit the big easy on sunday could easily result in waters rising in a residential neighborhood. it has in the recent past. in 1982 a pump in lawrence lake failed resulting in 200 city blocks being flooded over two days. the lake was subsequently deepened to handle the runoff. when the neighborhood we live in was proposed the playa lake in the plat was deepened to handle runoff. we live about a block from the boundary fence and "uphill" from the lake but i can foresee a time when the lake could overfill and water might find it's way uphill and into houses. mcdonald's lake was deepened to handle runoff from the new neighborhoods north, south and west of coulter road. little a-town, being situated on dry land, should the unthinkable ever happen, has options to address the problem. when the city in which you live is built in the middle of a swamp, options are limited. still, big easy, wdytwgth? aio