2024, Uncategorized, Weather

Storm Hysterics

34 Comments

I am writing this on Thursday afternoon, in the midst of intense local alarm at the prospects of bad weather. The NWS is predicting severe storms Thursday night with Gorilla Hail (it is apparently more than 2 inches in diameter and spikey), tornadoes, winds up to 80 MPH, and heavy rain. Local churches, bars, and the college are offering shelter for people and their pets. The entire western third of North Dakota may have this weather, and it is predicted to start at 5:00pm.

I am intensely skeptical, and I have a suspicion that it is being played up by the media. Of course, I could be wrong, so the cautious part of me decided to get the blog for Friday ready to go in case we have no electricity after the storm hits.

I have never seen such widespread alarm and fear in the 36 years we have lived here. There apparently is a family in town who is boarding up their house with plywood. The storms are the topic of most conversations. People are either hauling anything of value indoors, or putting things they want to get rid of outside for the storm to destroy. I am thankful we had our rain gutters and downspouts cleared out on Tuesday night by the teenage sons of a coworker. My plans are to sit at home with Husband and dog, and either watch the trees blow past or sit outside and enjoy the nice evening. If I don’t make any comments on the blog in the morning, you will know something has happened!

What gets you and/or your community all riled up? What are some of your mor memorable storm experiences?

34 thoughts on “Storm Hysterics”

  1. We’ve noticed the same thing on multiple occasions. It seems indicative of some kind of disorder in the weather news culture, or maybe a package of disorders.

    My wife thinks they’re trying to justify their existence, along the lines of “See? There’s danger! You need us!”

    Broadcast is a shrinking business. I don’t doubt they’re worried about their jobs.

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    2. It used to be the case that broadcast weather reports were the only way to get timely information about developing conditions. Printed sources, like newspapers, were too slow. With immediate online access to official sources like the National Weather Service, etc., the weather personalities have become redundant, sensational and unnecessary unless you like that sort of thing.

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  2. The tornado siren sounded at about 7:00. We went in the basement for about 10 minutes, then came back up. We got .72 inches of rain in about 20 minutes, with winds up to 89 mph. Nothing damaged, nothing flooded, no hail.

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    1. Thanks. I think the area around Mile’s City, MT had wind damage. Now the NWS is starting to talk about up slightly possible severe weather on Sunday!

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  4. I remember watching a tornado go across the sky several miles away from my upstairs bedroom window in St. Louis Park in perhaps 1965 (the year of the really bad floods followed by serious tornadoes in the Twin Cities.

    Worst thunderstorm I went through was on a canoe trip with Dad, Uncle, and Dad’s friend in the Upper Missouri River Breaks wilderness in central Montana. Talk about the middle of nowhere. Nonstop rain, wind, and lightning for six hours overnight. Our tent poles were bent by the strong winds. A tree branch fell on my uncle’s tent, collapsing it. It wasn’t too big, so he wasn’t hurt. So much rain and that other campers in our vicinity woke up to find their canoe had blown or was floated into the water by rising current and floated miles downstream. The only time in my life I truly feared for my life. Didn’t expect to survive that night.

    I was also in the middle of the historic 2012 floods in the Arrowhead. I was in the middle of a week-long canoe trip in the BWCA and had to cut it short for fear of hypothermia (or having a tree fall on me or getting hit by lightning.) It was as wet that spring as it has been this year, so starting any sort of fire to dry out and warm up wouldn’t have been possible the day I bailed. Despite the advent of “waterproof” packs, nothing is guaranteed to stay dry in that kind of rain.

    Phone service along the North Shore was knocked out. US 61 was closed in a few spots. All the rivers along the shore were at flood stage. Duluth streets were like raging rivers going downhill. Imagine my surprise when I was going home and had to make a 5-mile detour because I-35 near Carlton/Cloquet was flooded and impassible. That was the year you could see satellite images from space that showed the milky runoff from all the rivers into Lake Superior extending for miles into the otherwise crystal-clear lake.

    The power of nature is truly astounding and frightening. Everyone talks about “saving the planet,” but that’s incorrect. We need to worry about saving ourselves from the planet. Mother Nature is getting pissed at us for destroying the environment in so many ways. So when she finally gets tired of the human experiment on Earth, she’ll just brush civilization off the globe like brushing dandruff off her shoulder.

    Chris in Owatonna

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    1. I don’t know… my humble opinion only… I’m not certain a species that destroys its own planet and can’t live peacefully together deserves a second chance. We have the intellect to do it but we seem to lack the will.

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    1. People were joking about parking old campers on top of hills without anything securing the wheels so the wind would take them and they could collect the insurance money!

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  6. all there here it comes warnings are apt to be storms that just missed their course and knock down trees 100 miles away and the big storms that do damage are unannounced and a total surprise.
    I was out driving in 75 and 17” of rain came down in an hour. I had to figure out how to drive home on the high ground. I drove up hill on the freeway from the other side of the river and was driving through a 3 or 4 inch river flowing against me. When I got to the top of the hill there were taillights sticking out of a pond under the bridge so I got off the ramp and drove backstreets finding tail lights sticking out of ponds all over town.i made it home and called it an adventure.

    the first time I flew to china I was informed on the way over a monster hurricane racing to meet me as I landed. I sat in my 27th floor hotel room and watched horizontal rain blow by. They assured my my hotel was hurricane proof and thought nothing of it. 100degree 100 mph wind and solid wall of rain made it memorable. Stuff like hotel patio furniture and the cloth from displaced awnings kept flying by. Next day they said it was a big deal and I had to take back roads to my meetings.

    I got caught one more time in a downpour the windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with after a tornado blew by. I watched it fly over because my wife was concerned then jumped in the car to go to a business evening of entertaining some out of town bigwigs made it only 1 mile down the road before it became obvious all roads were closing in on me . I parked on high ground and swam home arriving 4 or 5 hours later walking and swimming past blinking taillights that were 6 feet under in newly formed lakes with distraught folks standing on the front steps of houses where they had never even thought about high ground relating to their basements well being. I was lucky there were no downed power lines or I would have zapped myself.
    I know ben mentioned he was sitting on purely saturated soil before any additional rain anticipated over the weekend . Then they got 5-7”. I hope he made out ok.

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  7. once with my little kids in the car they announced big hail was coming right at us. I jumped off the highway and went looking for cover. I ended up jumping over the sidewalk at a Kmart and parking right up against th building on the downwind side of the building, 5 minutes later all the huge hail passes and I pulled back out on the road past all the cars in the parking lot that looked like they’d been beaten with a ballpeen hammer.

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  9. I remember going down to the basement when I was about five, I think. Driving in a rainstorm, headed from Storm lake to my Sioux City grandma’s – Dad had to pull over to the shoulder, and we ended up turning back and going home.

    Then in high school, best friend Jennifer and I drove around a curve right by the flooded Lynn Creek – almost got swamped, but managed to drive out of it.

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  10. Rise and Shine, Baboons, from JacAnon,

    I am in the bloc of those believing that the broadcasters are getting too hyperbolic about storms. It gets old. Having grown up in NW Iowa I experienced many serious storms. Generally if a storm is dangerous you can tell–the sky is greenish, the clouds are low, often the wind is high, and the atmosphere is humid and oppressive. No hysteria needed to notice this.

    There is a story that one of my uncles who lived on a farm near Pipestone/Jasper, MN in 1966, stood in the front door watching a tornado take out the kids’ swingset in the front yard about 30 feet away. I saw the swingset afterwards, which was a mangled mess.

    I am sure I told this before. In May or June, 1983 I travelled in my old, rattlely VW bug, from Fairmont where I lived at the time, to the Cities for something with my then little boy. I listened to WCCO. As I neared the intersection of Hwy 62 and 35W North, the announcer said “There is a rotating cloud at the intersection of Hiway 62 and 35W.” I looked up and there it was, high above my car roof going round and round. It finally touched down in the St. Anthony area and did a lot of damage.

    I also have experienced a hail storm in a metal-roofed building. Very noisy.

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    1. That greenish color is a sure warning for bad weather. My grandfather said that if there was a storm brewing and it suddenly became perfectly still, take cover.

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  11. We had one of those green-sky storms when I was a kid at Cannon Lake. We had a seasonal cabin before we built our year-round home there. It was an old, two-story house with a big screened porch that faced the lake side. There was no bathroom, just an outhouse. There was no basement. We were constantly in the lake or down the hill near it. The day was very hot and muggy, then it clouded up in the afternoon. A strong west wind blew out over the dark gray water, making silvery green ripples on the surface of the water. I noticed that the sky was green, and heavy gray clouds were moving fast. In the distance I could see what looked like a wall of clouds. I told my brothers we’d better go in. We were almost up the hill to the house when Mom appeared in the doorway, hollering at us to come inside. We came in and toweled off as the storm crashed around us. I don’t know how fast the wind was but the boatlifts were flipped and the dock sections were blown all over. Charlie Altermatt’s boat was floating free out in the lake. Some of our toys blew into the lake and were gone forever. Dad was at work down in Owatonna so we were alone with Mom. Some trees came down, but we were safe in that old cabin. I think Mom’s fear rubbed off on me. I hadn’t really been scared until I noticed she was.

    I was really scared in 2018 when the tornado hit here. I’d never been in a tornado before. I went to the basement when the sirens went off and stayed there. I felt the low pressure in my ears, and I could hear things smashing outside. My neighbor on my west side had damage to his roof. A section of it blew off and when I went back upstairs, there it was on my deck. We lost several trees. Now I’m scared of tornado warnings and anxious when we’re under severe weather alerts.

    I agree that they hype these weather reports. Just last week there was a warning that overnight there would be storms with 70 mph winds. Nothing happened.

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  15. I sometimes wonder if this overhyping will eventually be a problem. We’re all getting pretty blasé about it, myself included. And at some point, there’s gonna be some horrible, terrible storm and not enough people are going to take the warning seriously.

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  17. What gets me riled up is 45. My community is solidly Trumpist but after last night’s debacle it has become worse. I’ve calmed down.

    Winter blizzards in the ’60’s seemed the worst but not horrible. At one, I learned how to play Pinochole at which I am expert.

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  18. I was driving on Shepard Road during the heaviest rain of that July 1987 storm in the Twin Cities. I couldn’t see the road clearly, so I drove more and more slowly until I couldn’t see the road at all. Then I tried to pull over to where I thought the shoulder would possibly be, and came to a stop hoping that no one was behind me.

    There was about 7 1/2 inches of rain in the first three hours of the storm. It was like trying to drive under a waterfall.

    https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/climate/journal/870723_24_superstorm.html

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