By Lori Ehde
Luverne residents woke up to soggy basements and overflowing rain gauges Wednesday morning after six inches of rain fell through the night.
Thunderstorms rumbled through the region starting at midnight and continuing through dawn, depositing enough water to replenish depleted subsoils and aquifers.
"This pretty much erased all deficits," said Mike Gillispie, hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Sioux Falls.
He said prior to August, rainfall in southwest Minnesota was three to six inches below normal.
August, however, is more than making up for this with 4 to 8 inches more than is typically seen in August.
"This brings us back to normal," Gillispie said.
It's too late to help most drought-stunted crops, and ironically, Rock County Emergency Coordinator Kyle Oldre is still filling out paperwork to declare the area a drought disaster for state and federal assistance.
Wednesday morning, he said, he switched gears to look for flood damage, which could have been worse in Luverne.
He said water retention berms built northwest of town after the flooding of 1993 slowed the flow of water in Poplar Creek.
"They did exactly what they were supposed to," he said. "They held it in and released it slowly through the pipes... just like a bathtub."
Despite the large amount in a small time period, Gillispie said the rain is still welcome.
"A lot of it will run off into river streams, but there are some areas of ponding, and you will see a decent amount of replenishing for water tables," he said.
"It'd be nice if we could get this water spread out over a four-day period, not a four-hour period, but we'll take what we can get."