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Storm Stories

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by toddamus, Jun 15, 2011.

  1. toddamus

    toddamus
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    This spring there has been a historically significant amount of powerful and deadly tornados. These tornados have the power to amaze and shock everyone, much like a lot of weather. I know me personally, the most amazing weather event I have seen was when I was up camping near Vail, Colorado. I was looking for my friends campsite when I hear see this flash of lightning (I was so close I didn't see the bolt, just a flash) and simultaneously hear this amazing clap on thunder, and then hail. It all happened so suddenly it was amazing.

    Focus: What's the craziest weather related event that has happened to you or that you've seen? Did your house get swept away by Katrina, did you get sucked up in a tornado?
     
  2. Nettdata

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    Might not be weather in the strictest sense of the word, but this volcano in Chile has fucked up the environment just a little bit.

     
    #2 Nettdata, Jun 15, 2011
    Last edited by a moderator: Mar 27, 2015
  3. Noland

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    We were lucky enough to live in a house that wasn't flooded by Katrina. As counter-intuitive as it may seem close to the Mississippi is where you want to be in New Orleans.

    I came back to the city 2 weeks to the day the levees broke. What amazed me is how quiet the city was. I live rock throwing distance from The River and there is always noise. The Public Belt Railroad is just across The River from where we are and the train blows its horn at 4 AM like clockwork. Ships blow their foghorns. The diesel chug of tugboats is so constant I don't even hear it anymore.

    When it wasn't there I wanted to hear it.

    It wasn't there.
     
  4. bewildered

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    Mobile is hit by hurricanes, tornadoes, and really violent thunder storms. In fact, though Seattle has more days of precipitation than we, we have more rainfall on average than they.

    I used to love thunderstorms (until all this tornado scare this year, now I get a bit tense). They tend to head from the south west to the northeast off the Gulf. In the summers we typically have an afternoon thunderstorm 4-5 days a week (this year we've had a bit of a drought).

    The best is when the storm is right on top of you and the whole sky is black. The raindrops are fat and you can feel the thunder in your bones. We have a shed on the back of my parents property with a corrugated tin roof, and I always knew it was a good storm when the tin roof would rattle uncontrollably in the back yard. Between that, the front door shaking in its hinges, and the sounds of thunder over top of us, thunder storms here can really be an awe inspiring event.

    Hurricanes are boring though.
     
  5. Juice

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    I heard about the tornados touching down about 20 miles from here in Springfield, MA and as I went to turn the TV on, I stubbed my toe on the ottoman. Ouch!
     
  6. dixiebandit69

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    Being a farmer's son living in the asshole of Texas, I appreciate any storms that come my way (it's always dry here). The last storm that amounted to anything was hurricane Dolly, a category 2 hurricane that dumped about 10-24" of water, depending on where you were.
    A lot of really nice houses that were built in low-lying areas got ruined.
    Aside from being without power for 3 days and my shop flooding (which was a huge mess, and in some ways I'm still cleaning parts of it up), everything was fine (for me). People living in colonias not so much.
     
  7. Muley05

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    My wife, long before I met her, had her house destroyed by the Andover, KS tornado in 1991. It is still one of the largest tornadoes on record. She was in high school at the time.

    My wife and her dad are both weather nerds, so they were watching the tornado come at them. They soon realized that no one else was outside, and that the tornado was about a mile away and coming fast. They went to the basement and the tornado went right over the top of them, destroying everything.

    Three somewhat funny stories out of the aftermath:

    1. Her dad and brother stayed up all night to keep looters out. Her dad mentioned he wished he had a beer, and her brother knew that she had beer hidden under her bed (remember, she was 16 at the time). So they drank warm beers all night.

    2. There was one interior wall left standing, and that was it for the whole house. On the wall, one of their pictures was still hung. Her dad removed the picture, and there was a large hole in the wall. He was amazed that the storm moved the picture up the wall, something went through the wall, and then the picture swung back. That was until they fessed up about having a party a couple of year prior and the hole in the wall happened then.

    3. Speaking of that wall, when the insurance adjuster came out to file their claim, he said that they could save that wall and rebuild the house around it. Her dad was pissed, so he grabbed a big chain, wrapped it around the wall, tied it to his truck and drove off, taking the wall with him. The adjuster then decided to stop being a pain in the ass.

    My wife and her dad were the only ones home at the time and suffered no injuries at all. Her brother and mom were away and also unharmed.
     
  8. Hoosiermess

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    My parents lived through the Palm Sunday tonados here in Indiana but the closest I've come to anything crazy, at least that I knew at the time was when we took a charter walleye fishing on lake Erie by Put In Bay. We saw about a dozen (estimated, I was hungover/drunk) water spouts running accross the lake. When we asked the Captain if that was a problem he said "Based on what the other Captains are saying no but if they get any closer we'll find out how fast this boat can go". Comforting. Nothing came out of it but it was pretty freaky/cool to see.
     
  9. lostalldoubt86

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    The closest Pennsylvania comes to crazy weather is hail and 90 degree weather. Last week, it scared the shit out of me when it started beating on my air conditioner. It had been unbearably hot all day, then all of a sudden hail.
     
  10. bewildered

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    90 is hot? HAHA. I must laugh to keep from crying.

    Edit: For the record, today was one of our "cooler" days because yesterday was rainy. Today's weather report? Clear skies, sunny, 95F with 50% humidity.

    And it is only June.
     
  11. Crown Royal

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    In 1984, London had it's only official tornado touchdown of my entire life, a day I will never forget. I looked outside as a shit-scared little kid, and the sky was pea-soup green and all the trees were standing sideways because of the wind, added to the effect a 15,000 foot tall pillar of fear was buzzing around the city making a sound like the universe's loudest train whistle. The small twister tore up the south end of my city before cutting a path directly at White Oaks Mall, the largest shopping mall in the city. Just before it smashed it, the twister cone silenced, sucked back up and basically the fucking thing BOUNCED right over top of the mall like it had an invisible force field built around it, probably sparing the lives of many many people. One person was killed, very minor compared to the insane shit in the States or Edmonton's nutso Black Friday F5 tornado in the mid 1980's that travelled hundreds of miles across the country and crushed a huge chunk of the city.
     
  12. Frank

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    I actually went to Springfield the morning after the tornadoes. The place was a mess with wrecked houses and shit all over the place. So basically it was the same as before the tornado, just with a few more knocked over trees.
     
  13. Diablo

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    I flew over the path of one of the tornado's near Tuscaloosa a little while back when they happened, here is what I saw looking out the window.


    That dead looking line was where the tornado tore through the area. Houses were ripped apart, trees were uprooted, cars were on their sides, roofs were torn off everything. That line extended on either side of us as far as we could see, and we were at 2000' in the air...and there were a few of these lines...
     

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  14. aceofface

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    Back in 1996 I was nine years old when hurricane Fran made landfall directly on my hometown. It wasn't my first hurricane and both of my parents were veterans of much more brutal storms than what this one was forecast to be; rather than bothering with the traditional hurricane shopping list they procured alcohol, ice, and batteries for their weather radio as well as enough non-perishable junk food and juice boxes to keep me happy for the duration of the event. We settled in in a windowless part of our living room that was elevated from the rest of the room and separated by a bar. I was lying on an air mattress trying to sleep despite the best efforts of the repetitious weatherman on my parents tiny battery powered television when all of the sudden the top of a pine tree penetrated the second story guest bedroom and sat about halfway to the floor in the room adjacent to me. The sound of the crash and the torrential rainfall seeping overwhelmed me and I vomited then and there on my pillow. After assessing the damage and even having to neighbors over to have a look we switched rooms and I slept very well under a bed.

    The subsequent power outage, heat and humidity combined to make one of the most miserable periods of my life. The heat drove my young self to extreme measures - I was wading in waist high puddles, taking numerous cold showers, and going through several packs of AAA batteries in my game boy. After a few days of this sweat drenched hell we moved into a series of shitty hotels courtesy of our insurance while the house was fixed. Good Times.
     
  15. pterodactyl

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    This happened to my highschool / town next to mine

    I wasn't there for it, I had graduated 3 years before and was living in California at the time but had a bunch of friends who lost their houses / farms.

    During track practice one year I looked up into the sky and saw a tornado start to come down from the sky so I pointed it out to the coach, who thought i was joking, it was rather nice outside, and we all ran inside and waited it out.

    When I was a junior in HS my town got hit with hail the size of softballs for a solid 30 minutes. It sounded like a freight train was driving through our living room. Mass destroyment and new cars/roofs/siding for everyone!

    Currently have this going on. Skip to 1:00 for the interstate that doesn't exist anymore.


    Hopefully it doesn't effect the tailgating for the CWS this weekend. (the lot we are in had 200 stalls underwater yesterday) I'm gonna go to Target and buy a snorkel, floaties and flippers to walk up to the tailgate in.
     
    #15 pterodactyl, Jun 15, 2011
    Last edited by a moderator: Mar 27, 2015
  16. Crown Royal

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    Wrath of fucking GOD:

    [​IMG]

    The Hallam, Nebraska tornado from 2004. The largest in history, 2.5 miles wide (4 km). Entire cities are that wide. FUCK. ME. RUNNING.

    Here it is forming. It looks like Satan's face:
     
    #16 Crown Royal, Jun 15, 2011
    Last edited by a moderator: Mar 27, 2015
  17. pterodactyl

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    Not only was it 2.5 miles wide at the widest, but it was on the ground for almost 2 hours and had a damage track of 50+ miles.

    I came back to visit the week after it happened and it looked like a bomb had gone off.

    <a class="postlink" href="http://www.nebraskaweatherphotos.org/may22-2004tornado-report.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.nebraskaweatherphotos.org/ma ... eport.html</a>

    There's a link with more pictures and photos of the damage to my old highschool. Thankfully where it hit is sparsely populated, Hallam had like 200 people, so while there was a lot of damage it wasn't near as bad as it could have been, like Joplin this year.
     
  18. hoju

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    My buddy is a meteorologist with the Nation Weather Service and is also an avid stormchaser. Here is a picture he took of a tornado in Kearney, Nebraska in 2008. Feel free to use this as your wallpaper. I sure have.
     

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  19. BadBrains

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    While not a huge storm, this was still eerie enough to make the news a few years ago. At the time I thought we were about to have a tornado, but that didn't actually happen until last year. And it went STRAIGHT down Main Street in Bridgeport, right through the ghetto.

    Anyway, the aforementioned shelf cloud:
     

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  20. jets22

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    I just came across this video of the tornado in Springfield, MA as it crosses the Connecticut River. The water being sucked up into the funnel is pretty wild.
     
    #20 jets22, Jun 16, 2011
    Last edited by a moderator: Mar 27, 2015