Sweeping ashore from Dixie County to Everglades City, the rainstorm that dumped as much as an inch and a half of rain on the western half of Florida on Tuesday morning gave sun-baked lawns a drink.
But neither the 0.59 inches of rain measured at the Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport, the 0.79 measured at the National Weather Service office in Ruskin nor the less than one-tenth of an inch that fell in Fort Myers was enough to change the fact that nearly all the Florida peninsula is in the early stages of a drought.
While the drought, by traditional measurements, has been mild, its impact has been far greater than what is shown on a rain gauge. The dry conditions have compounded the strain on the area's underground water sources, already drained by 9,200 new wells drilled in Sarasota County since 2000.
As a result, the area's main aquifer is down nearly 2 feet and hundreds of wells are running dry.
Consider:
Since March, 1.34 inches of rain have fallen at Sarasota-Bradenton airport, more than 4 inches below normal.
The aquifer that lies under Manatee, Sarasota and Charlotte counties is more than a foot below normal, according to the Southwest Florida Water Management District.
The Peace River was flowing about a tenth its normal height for this time of year before Tuesday's rainfall.
No matter how or where you measure water levels, they are below normal even by dry-season averages.
The situation is nowhere near as dire as it was at this time in 2001, when the region was nearing the end of a two-year-long drought in which the cumulative rainfall deficit reached more than 33 inches.
Even so, well-drillers are swamped, booking service calls two to three weeks out.
The Sarasota County Health Department normally permits 12 well redrills a month; it has permitted more than 30 in the past three weeks alone. And those numbers will only rise in coming weeks as companies work their way through their backlog of requests.
"Water levels have dropped anywhere from 10 to 100 feet," said Paul Milum of Sarasota-based American Drilling & Pump Co. Milum, who said his company is booking service calls two weeks out, calls the crisis "the worst I've seen in 25 years."
Milum and other well-drillers say the difference between this drought and more severe ones in the past is "the number of straws in the drink.
In addition to the more than 9,000 new residential wells permitted since 2000, Sarasota County reports nearly 5,000 more water customers today than it did just three years ago.
As Milum said: "The number of people who have moved down here and the amount of water they're using -- it's just crazy."
While politicians and planners continue to grapple with the region's long-term water picture, a solution to the current drought is nearly at hand: the rainy season.
The La Niña weather pattern that has kept the air dry and warm over Florida for months has significantly dissipated, according to meteorologist Rick Davis of the National Weather Service. As a result, the wet season should start as normal sometime between the end of May and mid-June.
In the meantime, there is a chance for scattered thunderstorms -- Davis was calling for a 20 percent chance of rain today and Thursday -- and possibly even more storms like the one Tuesday that Davis said surprised meteorologists.
Starting as a rather small upper-level disturbance in the northeast Gulf, near Mobile, Ala., Davis said it was nearly impossible to predict it would swing southward over the Gulf and hold together after hitting the dry, warm air in front of it as well as it did.
"The air mass was so dry ahead of it ... an upper-level disturbance that is very small to produce this much rain in a dry atmosphere is rare," Davis said.
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