Rare as hen’s teeth up here. Last night we had one.
Usually rain sifts down as anything from fine drops to fine mist that sifts down over three days. If we do get lightning, it’s usually ‘dry’ lightning, and virga, which is rain that evaporates before it hits the ground…that kind of lightning starts fires in the woodlands.
The sort with lightning and a downpour surprised us. They’ve been saying rain for days, and it would cloud up, spit three drops and quit, or cloud up, rain at night, and we’d never see it, except for wet patio chairs.
This time we were sitting in the living room talking to Lynn on the phone and — cowabunga, that was lightning! Jane of course got up and threw the curtains wide.
But it was soon over. This morning the skies are china blue and clear.
When we go south to visit, we always love driving through thunderstorms, and—like the kids from space—will run to the windows to watch.
My Mom loves watching storms. When it starts one or the other of us will open the blinds so we can watch. It really annoys her when we have to cover the windows during a hurricane because she can’t watch that rain sheeting down. Me, I do not like watching the wind and rain from a hurricane, no sirree!
Her dog hates thuderstorms, and sits there shaking and figeting, while mine just sleeps, unless we get a really loud clap of thunder. Then he’ll jump up (and sometimes even bark, dang it – he’s quite a barker and any excuse is a good excuse)and have a look round. Once he’s satisfied it was just a noise, he goes back to sleep.
I love sleeping when it’s raining… the sound of the rain hitting the awning above my window is lovely and soothing.
The story goes that W. C. Fields also loved sleeping in the rain and, as he lay dying, his girlfriend paid a kid to spray the garden hose over the roof so it would sound like rain.
I’ve had only two experiences with hurricanes—and I agree with taking cover.
I landed in a commercial jet with one of ‘those’ landings: we were in turbulent cloud, wheels down, total blind cloud, and just about the time we broke through the cloud deck—we saw concrete. We were over the runway, about to touch down, and it was pouring rain. This was either Tampa or Orlando, and I think it was Tampa. One of the strangest landings ever. I got my luggage, got a taxi—and the cabbie had the radio going, and the windshield wipers. I can still hear that voice saying “An airline pilot reported a possible hurricane…”
Yep. It was 1977. And that was the short-lived hurricane Babe.
My second, I was in Biloxi, MS for a convention, and had gotten to New Orleans to get my flight out. I’d already had a rough con: Biloxi had suffered a lot from a hurricane, and so had the hotel we were in. Food service was practically non-existent, and the room was not, well, it might have been good before the hurricane. Everybody was making a gallant effort. But I exited exhausted and a bit shaky from lack of sleep and food my allergies would let me eat. I got to the airport, but when I saw the storm building up and up—and the rate at which it was building, I thought, I can’t do this. I don’t care what it costs me, I’m not flying in this. So I went to the desk, said, “I’m sick.” The truth. “I’m going to a motel.”
Probably the agent thought (accurately) that it was really a weather wimp-out, but to my surprise, he moved my ticket. My luggage wasn’t loaded yet, so it was an easy transit to a hotel…
I got there, in a gale with driving rain, got out under the portico…ran in, porting my luggage and had no more than made the lobby when the front desk person yelled “Close the curtains, close the curtains!”—there were these green heavy curtains on what I think were at least 15 foot windows, and staff ran to pull them shut. Wind buffeted the building, and I stood there, waiting, because clearly Front Desk had a good deal else to do than check me in.
The gale passed. Through an imperfect closure of the drapes I could see palm trees bent way over with their tops blowing into a teardrop shape…and I thought, well, probably better here in the lobby than off in a room. The fire department will come here first. So I went to the bar. Turned out Jo Clayton had done the same, so we met, and had a nice evening. The storm passed. The noise quieted. The local news was on in the bar, logically enough, since they had just had a major blow…Many flights had been cancelled, but one Frontier plane, I think it was, had decided they had to land, and they’d gone right off the runway…so emergency crews were out rescuing the passengers from that, Lord knows how many hours it would take to get their luggage from baggage. They’d have to tow the plane, the FAA would be involved, and passengers’ baggage would probably be way down the list of priorities, not to mention stuff from the cabin, where they’d had to do an emergency-style evacuation in the driving rain…
No, ‘m, I didn’t want them pancakes. Not that flavor. I sat there sipping a martini, thankful to be where I was.
On the flight out, we passed through Texas on our way to Oklahoma, and the pilot told us, “Look out the window to the right. You’ll see a weather balloon, out of Palestine.”
Well, I had a good view, window seat, as everybody on the left surged out of their seats to get a look. I saw this impossibly long balloon shining in the sun, transparent like a jellyfish, and below it came this square object with a lot of angles, rather like a Mars Rover, though of course that wouldn’t exist for several decades yet…It floated right up past us…
And all the while my sleep-deprived, food-deprived, travel-jangled, too-late-in-the-bar-last-night brain was saying, “Palestine! Are we off course, or what? Or did that thing drift clear from the Middle East.” It took me another few minutes to remember there’s a Palestine, TX.
Jo Clayton… there’s a name I haven’t seen in a while, although I am currently slowly rereading her Aleytys series. I hope she is well.
I’ve been through a number of weather related, well, one wouldn’t quite call them disasters, maybe mishaps. I’ve dealt with minor tsunamis, earthquakes, blizzards, tornadoes, a couple of hurricanes, and a flash flood that required my class to smash a window and climb out of the basement where we were studying before the water reached the ceiling. Nature can be a Mother.
I just developed a severe case of foot in mouth disease; I haven’t kept up on my authors as I should and didn’t realize Jo Clayton was gone, decades ago. D’oh!
Yes, it was way too young, a shock to everybody, but not well publicized.
Hurricanes — I was about to write how I wouldn’t regale you all with hurricane stories, until I realized what a truly awful pun that was.
Palestine, TX. Yes, ma’am. Why, Texas is so big it has Palestine, Moscow, and Paris, just for starters. There’s also Dimebox, TX.
Next time a hurricane the size of Rita or Ike heads for my city, I am going to discover an urgent need to go sightseeing in Austin or points north.
After all, someone should be Seeking North. (Hint, Hint.)
They had a monsoon t-storm near Needles yesterday. It sent mud across US 95, to the point where semis were in mud up to their front bumpers – the site I was at had photos of several. And Monday last week there was one in the Antelope Valley that came with dime-sized hail. (I know that’s small by the standards of the plains states, but for SoCal, it’s good-sized.)
When I was a lot younger, I’d panic if I heard thunder, especially if I looked to the west and the sky was a dark bluish-gray. In my region of Ohio, we don’t normally get much in the way of tornadoes, I’ve heard it has to do with where we’re situated between the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes, and the two weather-makers seem to interact to keep our area relatively safe. We still get thunderstorms, and I’m no longer afraid of them, because I know what they can do, and if it gets to the point where there’s a tornado, I’m already in my basement, trying to give warnings out on amateur radio’s SKYWARN nets.
Hurricanes, OTOH, I’ve been through, as well as several typhoons. With the typhoons, they come clear across the Pacific with nothing to slow them down, and they just gather strength as they travel along the equator. When you’re only 660 miles north of the equator, it doesn’t take much for the storm to divert just enough to hit your island hard. I remember the damage done after Typhoon Roy in January 1988, the whole southern part of Guam was pretty well inundated. Roy wasn’t that strong a typhoon, either, not like Omar which was about 6 years later, and as I later learned, had destroyed the house that I lived in for 4 years on Guam. That was a cinder-block house, supposed to be earthquake resistant. I had storm shutters while I lived there, big corrugated aluminum shields that were number coded for the windows they fit, and was told by the housing office that I didn’t need the shutters, the windows were rated for 120mph winds. I looked right at the woman and asked her, “What are those things hanging on those palm trees across the street? Do you think my windows are rated for a 120mph strike from a coconut?” Her boss told her to get off my back, that I could keep the shutters, but we weren’t allowed to leave the ones upstairs on the windows once the storm passed, because “it looked ugly”. Yeah, well, my wife and I both had rotating duty watches, and YOU try to sleep at 3:00PM, even with shades pulled, it was still too bright in there.
I have never been through a tornado, I don’t even know how close the tornadoes on Palm Sunday 1965 came to our house, other than I remember the hail coming down the chimney in our fireplace. There was a tornado that came through, but I can’t recall where it passed through the city, if at all.
Now, if I get a chance, and it’s not too dangerous, I like to watch the storms AFTER they’ve passed by. Although one thing to remember about thunderstorms, if you can hear the thunder, you’re within range of the lightning. A lightning bolt can travel 40 miles, and you can’t look at that cloud and tell how far away it is just by looking at it. The referents aren’t available, and you might think it’s only 10 – 15 miles away, but the radar shows it’s actually 60 miles. So, looking at it doesn’t tell you how far away it really is, unless it’s raining on you (then do you really need to ask?). I don’t chase thunderstorms, I stay at home, make my reports to the National Weather Service, and hope that nobody gets hurt.
If hail was coming down your chimney you were likely close to something nasty. Hail has to do with a rising column of air, meaning a lot of up and down gusts in the storm, and if one gets to rolling and to rotating, well, there you are. But many tornados never touch down. Thank goodness!
Oh yes, I’ve been through the National Weather Service’s Advanced Storm Spotter training twice, been through the regular spotter’s training (which I host for my county) several times, used to attend the Severe Weather Symposium at The Ohio State University for a few years, too. I’d never make it as a meteorologist, but I do have a pretty good idea what I’m looking at in the sky when it starts to cloud up.
I don’t usually see the weather I’m reporting, unless I’ve looked out the windows, and during a storm, I don’t usually do that, due to lightning. Plus, if it’s severe, I’m in the basement on the radios calling in reports, so can’t look outside. I have a fairly sophisticated weather station at my home location, so I can report in things like wind speeds, rainfall amounts, etc. which all aid the NWS in evaluating the storms.
I just found out tonight that when we send them a report over the SKYWARN nets via Amateur Radio, it takes them about a minute to have it out on the national nets, so that the sooner we get the reports to them, the sooner they get the warnings out. I like doing that job, because it gives back to the people of my community, even if they never see me.
You definitely need a periscope!
Only if you can make it out of PVC tubing with no metal parts. Think of looking out of a periscope when lightning comes in… might be the last thing you ever see.
We were on Oahu in 1991 when Hurricane Iniki clobbered Hawaii. Until a couple of hours beforehand, it looked like Oahu was going to get a direct hit. We lived on the second floor of a shabby cement block apartment building next to the Kawainui Swamp on the Windward side; hearing the sirens go off at 5:30 that morning was eerie. DH started moving all of our computers and such into the walk in closet in the heart of the apartment, until we heard Iniki had been upgraded to a Cat 5, at which point we decided the building was probably a goner anyway. The other apartments were mostly occupied by military families with deployed menfolk, and the women were comparing notes and trying to figure out the best way to hurricaneproof their not-very-proofable units.
At the last moment Iniki veered off and we only got the fringes, but Kauai got run over by God’s lawnmower. Florida got hit by Andrew in the same week, so Iniki was mostly overlooked, even though Kauai was a hot mess. Sand and water was a yard deep in the lobbies of all the resorts on the south beaches, and Kokee State Park on the top of the mountain range in the middle of the island looked like it had been snatched bald. Hundred year old koa trees were uprooted, twisted until they splintered, or stripped of limbs.
Walking in the windy forefront of a storm is an excellent accompaniment to a temper tantrum, but still being out when the rain comes sheeting down cures the temper right quickly! I’ve been through a minor hurricane, and helped my family clean up after Katrina. A green sky still frightens me.
I’ve got a photo somewhere of my ex with a double handful of golfball sized hail. At the time, we were about halfway between Lubbock and Amarillo, Tx, in his step-van-converted-to-camper. (Imagine what tennis shoes in a dryer sounds like from inside the dryer…!) Out in the flatlands, you see the clouds piling up and when they reach up into the jet stream and get sheered off into an anvil shape, you can figure there will be thunder and lightning, probably rain, and most likely hail. You get the whole panorama of the storm front sweeping in.
I was in the second of the two tornados that hit Lubbock on the same night in 1970. There were two, an F1 and an F5. I was living in a garage apartment just above the “1” on the Second Tornado Track It’s not an experience I’d care to repeat, thank you. There’s a 20 story building downtown that took a direct hit from the F5 and the steel framework was twisted so much the elevators couldn’t move up or down. The building is still standing and still in use (they just put in smaller elevators!) It’s the tallest building to have survived a direct hit from an F5. It’s visibly twisted. Right after the tornado, all up and down the building, there were curtains hanging out over the “window sills” of windows that don’t open. They’d been sucked out between the glass, which wasn’t broken, and the frame of the window.
I never got into that part of Lubbock. We were usually west of Indiana when we went down there, and living in the next county, I wasn’t having to visit the courthouse. (My response to ‘halfway between Lubbock and Amarillo’ is ‘Plainview, Kress, or Tulia?’)
We were going to Palo Duro Canyon.
My mother made sure we went through there on our way back from a short trip up to Kansas. It’s an impressive canyon. (We were going south: it’s a surprise from that direction.)
I got ‘Armadillo from Amarillo’ partly for the cover, which is a painting of Palo Duro.
When I lived in Edmond OK, we got hit with cannonballs. These things were the size of the proverbial grapefruit. Our whole town was patched shingles, bright and new—looked like we’d been shelled. And broken camper roofs, broken windows. There aren’t as many when they come down that size, but those that hit, you don’t want to have hit your head.
It was around 1973 or so, when I lived in N. OKC, that a tornado nearly took my roof off. I remember several things distinctly: the glow in the rain, like lime-colored light, and the rain going one way on the back of the house, and the opposite direction in front. I added that real quick and dived for the pile of pillows in the hall, which was the smallest place I could get with no window; and the squeal of nails in the roof was just eerie, and the acute pain of low pressure hitting my ears was something else. The roof stayed on. But it was close.
The Lubbock building is real interesting. Well built, for sure!