JARDINE: When is a 'deluge' all wet?

From the e-mails and voice mails:

JUST A DRIZZLE — Yes, the valley's streets flooded a bit. A few roofs leaked, I'm sure.

Still, compared with some other parts of the state, the 2.38 inches of rainfall in Modesto over the five-day series of storms was akin to the rinse phase of an automated car wash.

Seriously, you want rain? In the state's northwest corner, the tiny town of Gasquet (pronounced Gas-kee), which averages nearly 8 feet — yes, feet — of rain annually, got 13 inches from the same storm.

And generally the state's second most rainiest place, the Sonoma County community of Cazadero, got a whopping 17 inches this time around. It averages 85 inches a year.

The big winner? Humboldt County's hamlet of Honeydew, which got a 20-inch soaking.

Those areas experienced some road closures, but no other major problems. Their secret?

"Steep terrain," said meteorologist Ryan Aylward of the National Weather Service in Eureka. "People here don't live on a cliff or next to the water. It's a different environment here."

Indeed, it makes a difference when gravity is a friend that gives storm runoff an exit strategy.

In Modesto, something as basic as a clogged storm drain can turn a street into a lake, as was the case in many places during the big cloudburst Sunday. Or the rock wells — those vertical leach lines — fill up and can handle no more.

City crews worked 24-7 to combat the leaves before the storm and spent the rest of their time unclogging drains. They distributed roughly 8,000 sandbags, and residents are still getting them with more rain due late today.

So what if we would have gotten the 4 to 6 inches of rain some experts last week predicted for Modesto?

"At that point, property damage," said Jim Burch, who heads the city's streets division. "Travel would be an issue. We'd be trying to keep people from harming themselves."

So rainfall is relative. In Modesto and throughout the valley, a couple of inches can seem like a deluge when the water simply has nowhere to go.

MORE TRASH TALK — Reader Tom Satre has followed my columns, along with stories in The Bee, about illegal dumping along county roads and on private land. It turned violent last month when Keyes resident Stan Hyer tried to stop illegal dumpers and was struck and killed by the fleeing pickup.

Satre also owns property near Grangeville, Idaho, and said that Idaho County has no illegal dumping issues and clean roadsides.

"There are dump bins at many of the crossroads," he said.

Idaho County residents pay an annual fee of about $200 per household to finance the bins, which are owned and emptied by a private contractor.

Would that work in the rural areas here? Idaho County spans 8,500 acres but only 15,000 residents, who seem to like where they live enough to keep it clean.

Stanislaus County, meanwhile, covers 1,495 square miles and is home to more than 518,000 people. Many use the franchise haulers, including Gilton, Bertolotti and Turlock Scavenger. Others haul their trash to Gilton's Recovery facility in Modesto, which charges $30 for a standard pickup load or $56 per ton. Or, if they're really ambitious, they drive out to the Fink Road Landfill on the county's west side, paying from $10 per pickup load up to $33 a ton, plus charges for mattresses, appliances, tires and other specific items.

The problem is that too many do neither, using the economy plan by dumping along the roads or on other folks' property. The taxpayers and private landowners end up subsidizing the cleanup.

As as for bins, leaving anything metal out where it can be stolen, cut up and sold for scrap these days is done so at a financial risk.

FAMILIAR STREETS — Murder mystery writer Michael Connelly, a former crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, set parts of his new novel, "The Black Box," in Stanislaus County and Modesto in particular, along with Manteca. The novel is Connelly's 18th and another in his Harry Bosch series.

Former Bee reporter Linda Cearley read the book and pointed out, "The landscape is fairly realistic although I know he took some literary license — unless there are a new In-N-Out Burger and Starbucks on Yosemite."

Sorry. Will a Web's Drive-In and the bikini-clad baristas of Bottoms Up Espresso suffice?

The book is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the other usual book-selling suspects.

Jeff Jardine's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays in Local News. He can be reached at jjardine@modbee.com, @jeffjardine57 on Twitter or at (209) 578-2383.