It’s probably for the best that the Cullman area entered this week without any significant soakings in its recent rear-view mirror, because Wednesday’s daylong deluge more than made up for the county’s relative short-term dry spell.

Beginning early Wednesday and continuing almost nonstop, the rain began to pour around 6 a.m. and was still pouring well into the afternoon, when Cullman County EMA director Tim Sartin spoke with The Times by phone while touring the area’s wet, but at least not impassable, roads and highways.

“I’m out here in it right now and it’s definitely wet,” said Sartin. “So far, it’s just a lot of water on the roads and nothing more serious. We haven’t received any reports of damaging flooding; just a doggone lot of rain. But Thursday morning it may be a different story, depending on how much more rain we get.”

The Huntsville office of the National Weather Service already had issued an area-wide flash flood watch set to expire Wednesday evening. NWS precipitation data from Cullman Regional Airport’s Folsom Field showed consistent hourly rain totals Wednesday that hovered near or above the .1-inch mark each hour from 6 a.m. onward, before shooting up to a quarter-inch of rainfall during the noontime period.

December and late autumn in general often have brought protracted deluges to Cullman County, though Wednesday’s rainfall doesn’t appear to have left the kind of lasting damage that local late-year floods have wrought in years past.

A Christmastime flood event in 2015 dropped 8 inches of rain in a two-day period and washed out roadways in Cullman’s Larkwood neighborhood; while last year, an October soaking doused portions of the county with more than 10 inches of rain in a 48-hour span, causing widespread damage to the county-maintained network of rural roads and drainage culverts.

Wednesday’s rain likely won’t last long enough to leave that kind of mark. The weather service anticipates cooler temperatures and clear skies when the sun comes up Thursday, with clouds (but no significant chance of rain) returning to the area on both Friday and Saturday.