Rain, rain go away
Weekend clouds put damper on some businesses.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
It has rained at least one day each weekend for the past month and that has put a crimp in the lives of some metro-area residents.
According to Chuck Rickard, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s office in North Little Rock, the metro’s June rainfall total is “below normal for the month” by 1.98 inches, despite the wet weekends.
The weather service measured 1.97 inches of precipitation at Little Rock National Airport, Adams Field, it’s official weather recording station. Normal rainfall for June is 3.95 inches.
The weather was “more unsettled in June,” Rickard said. This month “we should turn toward a drier trend.” He expects July to be “typical: hot, humid ... with some stray showers.”
Carl Counts, owner of Skydive Little Rock, said the intermittent rain has hurt his business. He’s only been able to work a “little bit here, little bit there,” he said.
His company does jumps almost exclusively on the weekend.
Counts said his company has to follow the Federal Aviation Administration’s “visual flight restrictions.”
“That means we have to be 500 feet horizontal and 1,000 feet vertical from any clouds and be able to see the ground,” he said. So anything short of clear skies shuts him down.
“It’s been tough,” Counts said. “[We’ve] only been able to do about half the business as usual.”
He said he can sometimes schedule a jump during the week but it’s difficult because most of his employees have other jobs.
In contrast, Curtis Butler, the manager of Paintball Arkansas in Conway, said the rain has been good for his business.
“To be honest with you, the rain hasn’t [negatively] affected us,” he said. “We still play in the rain.”
“The heat is actually a bigger factor,” Butler said. His business is slower in the summer than in the winter because of it.
“The rain has probably helped by cooling things off,” he said. Usually, the only time he calls off games is because of lightning.
The tennis pro at Burns Park in North Little Rock said the rainy weekends haven’t had too much of an affect on the courts there.
There have been “no maintenance problems” with the tennis courts Bill Bodie said.
“We do have big tournaments every weekend. When it rains, games are either delayed or moved inside,” he said. This causes the schedule to get backed up, Bodie said, because there are only six indoor courts compared to 23 outdoor.
“We don’t lose that much time” to rain in the summer, he said, because “the courts dry in about an hour. Then things get straightened out.”
Candace Walker, a teacher at Children’s House Montessori School in Little Rock, hasn’t let dreary weekends stop her from enjoying herself on her days off.
“We’ve been swimming on the weekends, just not when it’s raining,” Walker said.
If she and her family can’t swim because of the rain, “We may rent movies and just sit in the house.”
Weather hasn’t really been a problem, she said.
“If it’s raining, we’ll just find something to do inside.”
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