It's raining mud!

The Weather Girls and Geri Halliwell got it wrong, at least for our area.  It doesn't rain men here, it rains mud.  Yellow mud.  Very fine sticky mud that doesn't wash off.  It happens several times a year.

The first time we experienced mud rain was only several months after we moved down south.  I'd never heard of it before.  We got the worst case I've never seen since in February 2004.  We didn't know what it was, just one more mystery about living in the South of France.  Imagine trying to clean this up:

Our pretty garden

Our once black car

Notice the orange tinge to everything.  We've learned that this is a major clue of what's coming.  The whole sky turns this really eerie color, it's usually followed by rain, often just a drizzle but not always, and then everything looks like this.  Fortunately, it hasn't been this bad in ten years; that time was just horrible to clean up.  It just doesn't hose off, you have to physically wipe every area.  Every single inch you want clean.  (Think about wrought iron grillwork gates.)  We heard it played major chaos with swimming pools; but as we didn't have one at the time, I had no clue what that involved.

Well, now we do have our own swimming pool, and we still get the mud rain, so it's become our problem, too.  According to the pool store, this rain carries an algae that makes more of a problem for pools than the mud can, and that may be what has killed the water quality of our pool in past years.  But hopefully knowledge of the situation will allow us to keep it under better control now.

So as I explained earlier, we've opened the pool up already for this season, cleaning up all the winter dirt everywhere, including everything that had accumulated on the cover.  Got everything all crystal clear and shiny, then a week of bad weather rolled in.  Sigh.  And with it, a case of mud rain. Big sigh.  This time, we had a real downpour, not a drizzle, which means a lot more mud fell.

This is what I found when I got the nerve to go up and see the damage:

Mud lakes on top of the pool

This is how it looked the next day after most of the puddles had evaporated off:

Dried mud lakes

We weren't sure of the best way to get the cover off without dumping any more of this stuff into the pool.  Not a problem.  Remember I said it was sticky?  There wasn't much floating in the water.  So now we've taken off the cover, and I'm going to have to find some flat place where I can try to lay this cover out (it's 12' x 24') and scrub every inch of it.  Again.

There were pockets of mud on the floor of the pool, of course.  I didn't know if it would vacuum up or not, so I ended up sweeping the entire floor with a brush attached to the filter, hoping it wouldn't just blow back in.  Being sticky, it apparently didn't.  But the one day I could go back in to work out again after barely getting started back wasn't supposed to involve spring cleaning again.  I still have to wash the cover, which really does help to maintain a bit of sun warmth, plus keeping the evaporation down.

And just what is mud rain?  It is Saharan sand particles that get held in the air, then certain meteorological wind conditions send it across the Med to the Continent, turning our skies orange, usually including rain, and we try to turn into the Sahara, little by little.  Who'd have ever known?