Bad Weather Archives

February 26, 2022

Would You Like Ice with That?

Weather forecasts for SE Missouri had something for everyone in a week’s time. We had warm temps, single-digit temps, 4 inches of rain, thundersleet, freezing rain and snow.

There were reports of trees down and power outages scattered all around, but 1618 Kingsway dodged a big bullet (so far). Trees and bushes got a beautiful decoration of ice, but wind that could have caused serious problems didn’t materialize.

Frozen flag

When I looked out the front window the night the rain was freezing, I was surprised to see my American flag looking like it had been starched, then ironed flat. It was frozen into a solid sheet.

By the next morning, it was still mostly frozen, but there had been enough wind to create cracks in the coating.

The only casualty (so far)

I did a quick walkaround and saw a few small branches down, but this bent-over bush with the split trunk may have been the only fatality.

Still, though, the temps will be below freezing for another day, so there may be other trees and bushes that’ll crack under the continued strain.

Green covered with ice

Some grass and mosses were turning green under the warmer than usual winter, but they got a serious shock when they were covered with sleet, snow and ice.

I was surprised to see half a dozen robins wading in my front yard the day when the rain was coming down the hardest.

I ordered a generator

I bought a 3000-watt generator after Hurricane Hugo in 1989. It sat in my backyard shed unused except for annual test firings until the 2004 hurricane season when three storms passed over us, leaving us without power for multiple days.

After the first storm of the series, I ordered a 7,500-watt generator and added a kit that would allow it to run on gasoline, propane or natural gas. I also put a tap on our electrical service panel that would let me power most of the house.

Florida hurricane supplies

We keep all our hurricane supplies in a shed in the back yard. They include aluminum panels to go over the doors and windows, the generator, spare oil and filters, mounting hardware, and tarps (up to and including 30-footers).

Here’s a link to more detailed disaster planning that might be helpful even if you aren’t in the tropics.

We’ve been through the drill enough times that we can have the house battened down in an afternoon, with the help of Matt and Grandson Malcolm.

The smaller Hugo generator went to Son Matt, who used it at his house.

He rewired his house and bought a bigger generator, which made the old one surplus again. I reclaimed it and have it parked under my basement stairs in Cape “just in case.”

I had the electrical panel in Cape house upgraded from a four-fuse 60-amp box to a modern service panel. That started me thinking about a generator big enough to feed the whole house, if I was careful to balance my load.

Tri-fuel generators are hard to find

I dithered for months, but the ice storm caused me to pull the trigger. Once capable of running on gas, propane and natural gas are hard to find. I’m going to have to drive to Marion to pick one up the first week of March.

Even if it sits silent for as long as the Hugo generator did, it’s worth the comfort of knowing its there. (I think I paid $300 for the 3,000-watt unit. Three hundred bucks spread out over about 10 years was painless.)

Pretty ice photos

You can take a tour of my yard by clicking on any image to make it larger, then use the arrow keys to move through the gallery.

My old high school teacher and pilot used to repeat the old adage, “There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots; there aren’t any old, bold pilots.”

I spent a lot of time in the ink-slinging business being a bold photographer, but now that I have achieved the status of an old photographer, I’m not quite as bold. Not too many years ago, I roamed Cape shooting weather photos. This gallery was all taken without backing the van out of the driveway.

Here are some links to weather pictures and stories when I was younger and bolder.

March 26, 2015March 26, 2015

Welcome to Spring in Cape

I was driving around North Sprigg this afternoon looking for the old Shivelbine house before SEMO preserves it in a landfill. The address I had been given was wrong, so I was turning around in a driveway when I saw these young folks cavorting on a rooftop. I gave them a friendly wave so they’d think I was a little less creepy. I’m not sure it worked.

Shades of the old days

That reminded me of this single frame I must have taken when I was visiting my future best man, Andy McLain, at his apartment off William somewhere near Pacific. The place was pretty rundown, but I think I see why he stayed there.

Better get an umbrella

The weather report said we were going to have a front blow through that was going to bring a couple days of rain, so I went looking for a large umbrella to replace the one I forgot to put in my new van. Just after I got in the house, the weather alert went off with a severe thunderstorm warning. I wasn’t overly concerned because it sounded like the cell was north and east of us.

Not too long after that, though, the alert sounded about a strong storm near Mable Hill headed our way. This one had high winds, a possible tornado and large hail. When the first few small hailstones started falling, I debated jumping in the van and heading to the funeral home overhang, but all of a sudden the sky opened up. It was too late.

Marble size and bigger

I’ve been in hailstorms where the stones were bigger, but I’ve never experienced having so much ice fall at one time and propelled so hard. The way the stones were pounding against the kitchen window, I was afraid the glass was going to break.

Here’s just a little of the ice on my windshield about 15 minutes after the main storm quit, and after the rain had melted them smaller than their original pea and marble size.

Yard and street covered

In a matter of a minute or two, the street and yard were a solid white.

Hail makes me uncomfortable

I love storm chasing, but hail makes me uncomfortable. When you get large hail, that means there are some serious winds in that storm bouncing the ice around.

These photos don’t do the hail justice: while it was falling, there was too much water on the storm door to shoot through it, and I couldn’t open the door because I was afraid the wind might blow it from my grasp. By the time I could shoot these, quite a bit of rain had fallen and melted the ice.

Rabbit and solar lights OK

So far as I can tell, Mother’s solar lights and rabbit came through unscathed. I hope I don’t see any dimples on my car in the morning. Click on the photos to make them larger.

March 5, 2015

Snow on Cyders’ Mountain

Jessica Cyders, curator of the Athens County Historical Society and Museum in Athens, Ohio, and her husband, T.J., live on the top of a tall hill in a rural part of Athens County, a place that practically defines “rural area.”

How tall is the hill?

She texted this photo captioned, “TJ got the ATV stuck in the Ken Steinhoff Memorial Ditch. I just helped him pull it out with the winch. Snowshoes came in handy today.”

Steeper than it looks

The last time she and I took a road trip from Cape to Athens, we rolled into town late to find her driveway covered with wet leaves. “I don’t think you’re going to be able to make it up it,” she warned me.

I gunned the van. I mean, what does SHE know, she just lives there.

Just a little beyond where T.J. is standing, the road kicks up a few degrees. It was there that the traction control kicked in, then the wheels started spinning out. I conceded defeat and stomped on the brakes. The car started sliding back down the hill with all four wheels locked. I might as well have been on ice.

I booted her out to make it up to the house by herself, and started to back down the lane, which, unfortunately, has some curves in it. Every time I had to make a correction or step on the brakes, gravity would take over.

Ken Steinhoff Memorial Ditch

The next thing I knew, I was in a slow slide into a ditch. It didn’t matter if I gunned the engine or put on the brakes, it was just a slow-motion train wreck. I called Jessica on my cell to tell her about my predicament.

She and T.J. ambled down to see how bad the situation was. She had a smirk on her face.

T.J. teaches engineering at Ohio University, so I counted on him to take one look and say, “No problem. I’ll just go back to the shed and get some duct tape and some binder’s twine and we’ll have you out in less time than it’ll take the Little Woman to heat up some hot chocolate and bake us some cookies.”

Instead, he shook his head and said, “You need a wrecker.”

“Call me a wrecker”

I remember an exchange on the police scanner one night in the distant past: “Athens 1 to HQ, Call me a wrecker.”

“OK, Athens 1, you’re a wrecker.”

When it’s almost midnight-thirty on a cold, blustery, rainy weekend night, it’s not a good time to call for a wrecker. The first two companies said, “We’ll be there on Monday morning. If we can find you.”

The third guy said, “I’ve got my shoes off and I’m sitting where it’s nice and warm watching my girlfriend do her homework. But, I’ll be there shortly.”

I didn’t even ask how much it was going to cost. It didn’t matter.

The wrecker went sliding down the hill

About 40 minutes later, the wrecker showed up. After a little backing and filling, the driver hooked up a tow cable to my van. He told me to stay in the vehicle to “help” him try to move it. I’ve seen what happens when a cable snaps, so I wasn’t crazy about being in direct line of the tow, but I also couldn’t open the driver’s side door because it was up against a bank.

He took up the slack on the cable, the van gave a little lurch, then the wrecker started sliding toward me. He repositioned the wrecker, gave another pull, and got the same result.

It was time to get creative. He rigged a pulley to a tree on the opposite side of the road and said he was going to try to pull me crossways in the road, with the eventual hope that he could get me onto a solid surface pointing downhill.

When he finally got me to a 90-degree angle to the roadway, he said, “Give it the gas. See if you can pull yourself up and out.”

“You can’t see it in the dark, but about four feet in front of me is a steep drop-off that ends up in a creek,” I warned him. “If it grabs hold, you’re going to see a blur and hear a splash.”

“You’ll be OK,” he assured me.

He was right

The tires got some bite, I got pointed downhill, he unhooked the cable and said he’d go to the top of the hill to turn around, then he’d meet me at the bottom to settle up.

The trip down was a little interesting, but I made it down to flat ground where their lane meets what passes for a real road. I waited. And waited. And waited. After about 30 minutes, he pulled alongside me.

“I thought I was going to have to call a wrecker for the wrecker,” he said.

“Are you the owner or a worker bee?” I asked him.

“I own the company, but I’ll entertain an offer right now.”

The job cost me a hundred bucks plus a tip. Worth every penny of it.

I was about as happy as Curator Jessica doing a snow angel selfie.

[Thanks to Jessica for providing the photos.]

November 16, 2013

New Emergency Sirens

We saw a bunch of heavy equipment parked around the fire station up the street, plus a big pole on the ground. When I got back from Perry County the other day after dark, Mother said there was some new kind of gizmo sticking up in the air.

It turned out to be one of the new emergency sirens the city was installing to augment the four it already had. When we went under a tornado warning the other night, we could barely hear a siren off in the distance.

Of course, that might be because Mother is Storm Central. She had the TV blaring, a scanner in the living room talking away and she was holding a portable scanner. From time to time, the weather alert radio in the hallway would add to cacophony.

Ain’t no storm going to sneak up on her.

Bad weather has been in the news

For about a week, the weather folks have been hyperventilating about a cold front predicted to move through here this weekend. Much to their dismay, it looks like it’s just going to be – as they are fond of saying – just a “wind event.”

… Wind Advisory in effect from 8 am to 8 PM CST Sunday…

The National Weather Service in Paducah has issued a Wind Advisory… which is in effect from 8 am to 8 PM CST Sunday.

* Winds will increase and become strong and gusty Sunday ahead of an approaching storm front.

* Timing: south winds will really pick up during the daytime hours Sunday as a weather front approaches. The strongest winds with the highest gusts will be ongoing through the midday and into the afternoon hours.

* Winds: south winds will average 20 to 30 mph with gusts to 40 to 50 mph at times. These will be the regular gradient winds occurring without the aid of a thunderstorm.

It’s probably good this isn’t going to be a big deal storm, because the new siren hasn’t been hooked up yet.

This is not a good thing

“This is not a good thing,” I warned her. “I can write the story right now: ‘A house at the corner of Kurre Lane and Kingsway Drive, just a hundred yards from an inoperative emergency siren, was struck by a tornado that picked the structure up and carried it to parts unknown. Observers reported hearing what they thought sounded like a police scanner getting fainter and fainter as the house was sucked up into the clouds. City work crews will have the siren hooked up Monday evening.'”

Kinda makes me think of Guy Clark singing Tornado Time in Texas:

well, the sky was blacker than a funeral suit

hotter than a depot stove;

hide in the cellar

here comes amarillo

blowin down the road

ya got yer hail stones big as hen eggs, boy,

yer clouds as green as can be

old mother nature’s raisin hell

she parked a pickup in a tree.

tornado time in texas

take the paint right off of your barn

tornado time in texas

blow the tattoo right off of your arm