Question of the day: Saturday March 9

I'm just keeping an eye on a category two cyclone in the Pacific, and am reminded ones that have hit us, of being in typhoons in Hong Kong when you could feel your tall building wobbling, and then the extrordinary clear and biting air on a mountain top, or the most stunning sunsets I've watched from a tropical beach. 

So I thought it would be interesting to ask:

What is the most extreme or memorable

weather you've ever experienced?

                  

Probably Hurricane Lothar, which hit Germany on December 26, 1999. There were fatalities as well as major property damage, and the woods around here were "no-go zones" for months.

For us, it was Hurricane Agnes in '72. We lost our home and pretty much everything in it.

Probably the flooding rains we had a few years back. Many people lost their homes. It took some businesses a year to reopen. I think it took us over a week to dry out the basement.

Super Typhoon Pongsona in Guam (2002). We knew it was coming so I was prepared, but it was still scary going through it alone. At it's peak, I was huddled in the spare room closet with the cats and my cooler of beer (I did say I was prepared  ). No major damage to our house, thank god. Gotta love typhoon shutters and concrete houses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Pongsona

A close 2nd would be the F-4 tornado that passed 1/4 mile from where I was working in 1998. Keep in mind, this was in the mountains of western Maryland (Frostburg) and tornadoes are very rare. I think the last one that was confirmed was in the 60's. It was night, and storms had been going around us all day, including some that produced small funnel clouds.  We were closing when 2 emergency crewmen came in to tell us "it is coming". We looked out the door, and when the lightning came, we saw a huge thing coming over the mountain heading straight towards us. So, again, I huddled, with my co-workers, in the men's bathroom (only interior room) listening to my ears popping, the building creaking, the sound of a jet (tornado) and waiting for the roof to be sucked up. Again, no major damage but it scared the crap out of me. 

http://www.erh.noaa.gov/lwx/Storms/Frostburg.htm

Super Storm Sandy had to be one of the worst for NJ/NY altho it didn't hit my area as bad as others.
 

Hurricane Andrew in Miami - I think in 1992. We were in Ft. Lauderdale and it was heading for us but somehow did a southerly turn and devastated south Miami, Homestead in particular. Will never forget the devastation there, but we were lucky in Ft. Lauderdale and somehow it missed us. I remember lying awake all night when it was headed our way, wearing clothing in case we had to run, and had the cat carrier next to the bed in case we had to pack up. We only had Boots at the time. I still remember the date - August 24.

A toss-up between the Christmas 2000 ice storm and the tornado last year that got close enough I was at the edge of the hail core.

Great question!

I awakened one Sunday morning to the extremely loud sound of a dozen or more men with sledgehammers destroying the roof of the house. The sound was like a war zone: bam bam bam BAM! bam BAM! like it was being hit continually but with a REALLY good hit added in here and there. It was a hailstorm (Austin Texas in the 80's) with baseball sized hail plus grapefruit-sized (4" diameter) hail thrown in. (Large hail like that hits the ground - or car or house - going over 100 mph.)

The guys who fixed the roof said it looked like a bunch of guys with sledgehammers were up there. 

Hurricane Fran (I think it was).  We're far enough from the coast that I didn't think hurricanes would ever be an issue, but it came ashore in Wilmington, got on the Cape Fear River, and came right on up to us here.  Power was out, you could hear the wind, you could hear trees going down, it was pretty scary.  When it got light, we went out for a walk around the neighborhood and trees were down everywhere, on houses, cars, etc.  We were very lucky to lose only one tree in the back and it fell away from the houses. 

Other than that, an ice storm with the power out for three days and no heat in the house, was not particularly pleasant.

Good question!!

I think it was in 1993 or 1994 we had a blizzard.  I was in elementary school and my Mom hadn't remarried yet.  Mom had to crawl out a window to dig out the front door.  Our car was buried in snow over the hood and trunk.  It started raining at the end of the storm and formed a layer of ice thick enough that you could walk on top of the snow.  Our neighborhood was not paved so the guy who did the plowing wasn't getting fully down to the dirt.  That rain made the roads a sheer sheet of ice.  People were outside with ice skates on having a great time!  Those of us who didn't have ice skates were running and sliding on the ice.  (Ok the kids were!    I'm sure the extra snowsuit padding helped!)  Our lights did flicker a few times but we never lost power.  I think we lost TV for a short time.  

Winchester said:

For us, it was Hurricane Agnes in '72. We lost our home and pretty much everything in it.

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Golly, that's a pretty devasting experience.  Where you there when it happened?

No, we had left and went to stay with Rick's parents. We were married a little over a year and our son was still a baby. Rick's parents called around 1:30 in the morning; they needed help getting their water heater, washer, dryer, etc out of the basement. Rick headed over and when he got to the bridge, the river water (from the Susquehanna) was already running over the bridge at that time. He got to his parents' house, called me, and told me to pack as much clothing as I could for everybody. He came back, picked us up and we headed to his parents' house again; had we stayed any longer at all, we'd have been stuck there....we wouldn't have gotten out at all. We stayed with Rick's parents for about 3 months or so before we were able to get into a HUD trailer and we stayed in that trailer for about a year before moving into our first house. 

When the water dropped and we could get back into the area, we realized that the water level of the river and of the canal had come into the trailer and had made it to about nose-height on me. I was 5'6". We lost everything we had: clothes, dishes, old record albums, furniture, all the baby's things (crib, playpen, all that stuff), everything. We had just bought a new washer; it wasn't even two weeks old; we had no credit and we saved forever to buy that washer. What little we could salvage we had to wash thoroughly in Lysol. We spent hours washing stuff in Lysol water in an old iron tub in the garage. The only thing that we really walked away with (other than the clothes that I had packed that night) was a ceramic Snoopy cookie jar that Rick's sister had given us for Christmas. We found the base of the cookie jar on the kitchen counter.....Snoopy's head was on the kitchen floor. Evidently, as the waters rose, his head came off the base. When the waters receded, his head went to the floor. He now sits on top of our kitchen cabinets, even though he has a tiny chip out of his nose. (I remember that I had baked a Boston cream pie that afternoon for dinner that night....and when we opened the fridge door after we came back to the trailer, the smell was terrible. It was over 30 years later when I made another Boston cream pie.)

We were lucky though. We were one of the few with flood insurance. Not many people back then had it, even those who lived in the floodplain. And when the money came through, we used it to buy our first home......up on the hill! We're still there, in another house further out the road from our first house. But we're still on that hill. I was 17 years old when Agnes hit us; Rick had just turned 21. Our baby son was about eight months old. It was a rude awakening.

Hey Mooch! Was that the March blizzard? If so, it dropped almost 30 inches of snow on us. They had to bring loaders out the road to dig out the snow. As I recall, that blizzard happened over a weekend....I called off work that Monday because PennDOT still wasn't out to us yet. We never lost power from that one. I had baked cookies and when the men finally made it out to us along the road, we had cookies and a thermos of coffee for them. (When the going gets rough, I must bake or something. We always remember the Boston cream pie from the flood and the cookies from the blizzard. Whenever something happens, I bake.   )

Our front yard looked like a moonscape....honestly it looked like something from another planet. And back around the pool fence? Well, we have a four-foot fence around our pool and you couldn't see much of the fence at all. The wind howled around the house during the storm and the drifts were just amazing. Rick and I went out the next morning....you couldn't walk on the road; you'd disappear in all that snow. We walked in people's front yards down the road and back, just to see what all was going on. We didn't have a plow guy back then and no way were we digging that driveway out....not with all that snow. We dug a path down the driveway and that was it. We had purposely parked both vehicles down at the bottom of the driveway and dug them out there. And walked up and down the path until a lot of the snow melted.

Our son was in college when the blizzard happened. He was fine.....and he was very happy that he didn't have to shovel snow!

Weather! Gotta love it!

I remember the blizzard of 1993 (or 1994...can't remember) too. Cars were stuck in the middle of the road, it was piling up so fast. They had to get dump trucks and front loaders in to clear out the parking lots, there just wasn't anywhere else to put it all!

You know I really don't remember what month.  I turned 11 in the fall of 93 so I guess I was pretty young.  It was an ice storm where I live now.  The fire departments had to go house to house in some areas to break the ice off people's doors so they could get out of their homes.  

We'd had a couple bad winters back to back.  My Mom had bought a very nice trailer in a small community.  Most were the kid you could put on a permanent foundation and no one would know it was a trailer.  Anyway; one side of the neighborhood had no houses so they used that area to pile snow from the loop the neighborhood made.  Those piles were so high we would go sled down the back side of them!  The front was all heavy snow-boulders so they were fun to climb too.  It was a good time to be a kid!    I know I have a picture of my Mom's car all buried in the snow.  I think of our front door too.  

Back in the '50's there were a number of hurricanes which hit coastal Carolina within a 6 to 8 week period. It was devastating. I was just a kid. We always had to leave home because my dad didn't trust the old farm house to stand. I remember spending some nights at the local community building because he didn't get home in time to get us back out because of tide water across the highways. We looked out the window and saw two of our cousins going down the middle of the highway in a boat with the motor running after the storm. Other times we spent nights sleeping on the floor wrapped up in quilts at the high school. The Red Cross was always there and we got donuts and coffee, a real treat for kids. We were never allowed to drink coffee at home and I had never seen a donut.:lol3:

It's funny to look back at these things we experienced as kids.  I know if I'd been an adult when that blizzard hit I'd have been much more nervous and probably grumbling about all the shoveling. 

Mani said:

I'm just keeping an eye on a category two cyclone in the Pacific, and am reminded ones that have hit us, of being in typhoons in Hong Kong when you could feel your tall building wobbling, and then the extrordinary clear and biting air on a mountain top, or the most stunning sunsets I've watched from a tropical beach. 

So I thought it would be interesting to ask:




What is the most extreme or memorable
weather you've ever experienced?

      :Raindrops: :sun:

:9:   :9:

:sun: :Raindrops:       





:heart4:

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The Ice Storm of 1978! I'll never forget it! Nothing but ice for days. Power was out in most places for 10 days or more. It was really bad!