Rain, rain, rain.

Our first home had a rough sump hole (hacked through the concrete) and we had water in the basement in Spring, with the snow melt.  It galvanized us and in subsequent houses we carefully looked for any sign of water in the basement.  We had a spectacular failure in one house, but where we now live we are high and dry.

Solway gets a hundred year storm.  I have lived in a house on a poorly drained lot that saw two 50 year storms a week apart. It was the kind of weather where local bridges were in danger of washing out.  I videotaped the back yard filling up, and us trying to wet-vac the basement as water gently pooled in - a gentle but persistent flood.  The good news that day was that the furnace was not in danger - the water stalled short of  the appliances.   My backyard was  a pool.  So I pictured that kind of catastrophe for this little town that had just let go its emergency personnel.  Every drop of rain in that book, I personally felt.

Chemistry

It's all a matter of chemistry.  Chemicals bond, chemicals interact, they evolve.

In Mud Season, full drums of chemicals are abandoned in a dumpsite.  This isn't that odd.  I grew up in Niagara Falls, home to several chemical companies and, in the seventies and eighties, buried drums surfaced in former dumpsites that had not been well documented.  People had moved in, and found these unwanted surprises bordering their property.  Love Canal was just one of these.

Another variable, an important one, is dosage.  So many chemicals, in different doses, do harm and then save lives.  Warfarin (Coumadin) is a well known blood thinner.  In one dose millions of people who've suffered heart attacks can continue living with a reduced risk.  In another dose, warfarin is rat poison (D-Con) and its same effect compels small animals to drown in their own fluids.  Polyethylene glycol is found in anit-freeze.  A much lighter dose is ingested by people preparing for a colonoscopy.

So it's all a matter of dosage.