Spokanites are pretty good with ice and snow.
Yesterday, however, we had one of those Oklahoma toad-stranglers, aka, a tropical style rain, greys out the distance, comes down hard, and fills streets to the curbs because it’s too much for the drains to handle. We live on a 30 mph arterial on which speeding is not too unusual.
Yep, no slow-down—even delivery vans and box trucks were running into one of the really good puddles, about 10 cars long, at about 40, in a downpour that’s going to blind them for significant moments, as their windshield wipers can’t keep up at that speed. Sedans, yep. This is, oddly enough, at the top of a winding mile long hill. I wouldn’t give much for their brakes when they reach the stoplight at the bottom. They were raising rooster tails two and three times the height of a sedan roof.
You’d think the ‘unusual’ would signal people to be cautious. Nope.
Toad-strangler is a term I haven’t heard for ages; it goes along with stump-soaker and gully-washer. DH calls those microburst rainstorms ‘IFR conditions’, which they are, actually. Bad weather conditions seem to negate survival instincts in a way I don’t comprehend. Witness people winding up in ditches while going out in a blizzard for beer, or chasing tornadoes around in souped up vans. Sensible people lay in provisions, hunker down or bug out, and have contingency plans.
Heh, you should try living here on the coast where we’re used to rain, but snow happens MAYBE once a year…Oy vey. Once my MIL came to pick me up at the airport (a 3 hour trip each way, over the coast range and down a FIERCE canyon road) after I’d been traveling 15 hours (east coast, where I grew up and learned to drive in snow, to west coast via Timbucktoo AND East Overshoe). I took the keys and drove home because she said there was snow starting while she drove over. Her theory on driving in snow was literally ‘Go faster so you get out of it sooner.’ There was no hope of a motel, so I just tucked in behind the plow and followed it home. These people are CRAZY when it comes to snow!
I haven’t heard gully-washer in a coons age.
A friend in Indianapolis introduced me to the term “goose-drownder” (with a second “d”). I’ll have to try mentioning “toad-strangler” to him.
If you have any extra “toad stranglers” please feel free to send them back to TX/OK. We could use a real good one here, like once a week for two or three months. I live on perhaps a 10% incline, what passes for a hill in these parts, and we drain to this gigunga playa lake at the “bottom. On the increasingly rare (alas!) occasions when we have a “precipitation event,” the gutters are so full that there is only a narrow strip down the center of the road that is not under water. If you stand in the gutter, the rain is about mid shin level and surges nearly up to your knee on the upstream side. We got what amounted to a “cloud raspberry” the other day with about a handful of rice sized hail. Grumble. . . I hesitate to mention “t*rd floater,” as it’s not what you’d call genteel.
Heh-heh—what you need—is a pond about the size of your back yard.
Yep, I know that kind of rain.
We are having gorgeous weather. It won’t last, but wow — how nice! Next week we’ll drop back into the 60’s during the day and 40’s at night, but right now the cats and I are just enjoying it.
Never underestimate the ability of the human animal to demonstrate stupidity.
“How do you define ‘fool’?”
“I don’t try to define it. I wait for it to demonstrate itself, it usually exceeds my wildest imagination.”
(Sorry, I don’t have the books here any longer, they’re packed away and in storage, and I have to go by memory.)
Speaking of toad stranglers, I think we’re having one here as I type. Any form of precip is extremely welcome in these parts. I may have to get up and dance the happy dance.
We get something like that in Brackley sometimes (though not in a while). We call it a ‘Brackley Special’. The sky will suddenly go very dark then for ten minutes it’s like a monsoon – sometimes you can hardly see the other side of the street.
I think I saw a document once that suggested I live in the UK version of ‘Tornado Alley’ and when they described the build up to a tornado it sounded very similar. Apparently the UK has one of the highest densities of tornado strikes in the world. Luckily they are mostly very weak and rarely do more than disturb roof tiles. Still – I’ve been living there over a decade and had no idea :-/
We have F1s and F2s here in WA. The Fujita Scale is like the Richter Scale: it’s exponential. An F2 can take a board fence down. An F3 can take your roof off. An F4 can remove the furniture from your house and lift the house from its foundations. And an F5 can suck the grass right out of your lawn and leave a mudflat over the bare concrete slab where your house was. An F5 is a ‘take cover below ground’ event and can be a mile wide. I’ve had several F3’s skip over my house when I lived in Oklahoma City: I rode out an F4 that nearly took my roof off and deposited a huge neon restaurant sign some 15 miles from its origin in the field beyond my house. It also rained checks from a business down on the Texas border, nearly 300 miles away. When OKC region was hit by an F5 and we had CNN trucks sitting all over the place, I began to think maybe it was time to move north. Up north, we just don’t have the bigger ones. Thank goodness. And last I saw it looks as if Oklahoma and Texas are in for rough weather today. Good luck, you guys down there!
And we are now in the heart of Tornado Season for everyone in Tornado Alley. I suspect global climate change may be expanding the parameters of TA. Having ridden out a flash flood, a hurricane, several minor tornadoes, one or two small brush fires, a couple of earthquakes and a handful of tsunamis, anyone in harm’s way has my full on sympathies. And anyone who thinks I’m just a natural disaster magnet gets a kick in the shin 😉
Today’s effort, weatherwise.
http://www.newson6.com/story/17189064/severe-storms-blanket-eastern-oklahoma