Images of Detroit Underwater by Joe Gall
All photos by Joe Gall

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Images of Detroit Underwater by Joe Gall

On Monday, an unexpected deluge dumped six inches of water on Detroit. The storm didn't even have a name.

On Monday, the Detroit metropolitan area was hit hard by storms intense enough to drop 5 to 6 inches of rain over the course of an afternoon, almost but not quite beating the city's precipitation record. In one 24 minute period, the city's airport saw almost an inch and a half of rain. To visualize, imagine that as two feet of snow.

Detroit, like many American cities, is crisscrossed by a web of subsurface freeway viaducts, basically dry canals or canals-in-waiting. The result of this week's unnamed storm, which averaged more rain than Hurricane Sandy did over its entire East Coast run, can be seen in the photos below by photographer Joe Gall. It got so bad—and so deep—that divers were called in to search submerged cars for trapped motorists.

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Gall was on the move for several hours Monday night. "My original plan was to meet up with some friends and go rafting in the streets," Gall told me, "but on my way to where we we're meeting it became clear that this wasn't a joke so I pulled out my camera and started documenting the flood chaos. It wasn't hard to find crazy scenarios because everywhere you looked was a nightmare."

"The emergency crews we're doing everything possible to help," Gall said. "There were multiple homes on fire that couldn't be reached because of flooded streets blocked by stalled vehicles. I witnessed a lot of civilians helping the best they could to push cars out to safety and clear storm drains by hand."

Follow Joe Gall at @camerajesus.