Back in the heyday of "60 Minutes," the saying was that you knew you were in for a bad day if you arrived at work and found investigative reporter Mike Wallace waiting on your doorstep. It was the same way Monday for Cobb when we turned on the Weather Channel and found disaster-chasing weatherman Jim Cantore reporting from our own backyard. It was a storm that turned Six Flags Over Georgia into Six Flags Under Water.

When I watched the coverage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005, I never in my wildest dreams expected that Cobb County would ever experience anything remotely similar. But I guess that's why it's never a good idea to say "never."

A week ago today, Cobb County, and especially west and south Cobb, was being pelted by unprecedented rainfall that continued, and even worsened, through the night and most of Monday morning. By the time the storm had moved out, it had doused much of the county with 20 inches of rain in not much more than 24 hours. It turned rivulets into torrents and ankle-deep creeks into raging rivers that swept over roads and bridges and into neighborhoods and homes.

Airborne photos of stricken areas of south Cobb were staggeringly similar to those taken just after Katrina, with nothing showing but rooftops amid acres of muddy floodwaters.

Like many, I was forced to zig and zag as I drove to work Monday morning as the streams finally crested their banks, and stopped to snap photos of Allatoona Creek as it poured over the Burnt Hickory Road bridge in northwest Cobb. The creek, usually just three or four feet wide and no more than shin deep, had surged out of its banks on both sides and into the surrounding horse pastures, creating a sheet of roiling water hundreds of yards wide that threatened nearby stables.

Cobb Police Sgt. Steve Tidwell had parked his cruiser up the hill to block traffic, but told me that just as he had arrived he had been unable to prevent an SUV from driving across the submerged bridge. I don't know who the driver was, but he was incredibly lucky - and incredibly stupid.

The bridge is just downstream from the athletic fields of both Harrison High School and Dominion Christian School, and in a rare moment of what passed for levity on such a dark morning, Tidwell noted that he had watched as a football, a basketball and two soccer balls floated by. The words were barely out of his mouth before we noticed a volleyball heading downstream as well.

I also took pictures at a bridge nearby where an unnamed tributary of Allatoona Creek passes under Burnt Hickory in a box culvert-style bridge that, with its steep embankment, towers 20 feet or so above the waterway. The brook creek typically is no more than 18 inches wide, narrow enough to step over. Not Monday. It had backed up behind the embankment and was spilling over the roadway, reminiscent of a spillway over a dam. And yes, there was a parade of SUVs risking the bridge crossing. I even watched as a bright red Dodge Viper drove over, the water up near his headlights. I couldn't watch anymore, and left.

I returned the next morning to find the road blocked and the bridge out. The culvert had held, but the dirt embankment had given way, along with road shoulder. The steel guardrail now was a twisted wreck, looking as though it had been snapped like a whip. That bridge is closed for the foreseeable future.

But that damage was nothing compared to what happened in the Austell and Powder Springs areas, where nearly half the population was left homeless by the floodwaters.

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The weathermen described this as a 500-year flood, meaning that a flooding event of this magnitude is statistically likely only once every 500 years. Let's hope that's right and that we never see another one here in our lifetimes.

We're still talking about the Blizzard of '93. And we'll be talking about the Flood of '09 for just as long.

Joe Kirby is editorial page editor of The Marietta Daily Journal and co-author of the forthcoming "Then & Now: Marietta Revisited."