Yesterday the mother of all storm systems passed though our area. We had wave after wave of thunderstorms, extremely high winds and tornado warnings. Many areas lost power (including us but, thankfully, only for a little while). I wouldn't know how to explain it all in meteorological terms, but Tom Skilling, our WGN and Chicago Tribune Weather Guru, says it had something about all the warm moist air being sucked up into thunderheads that were 60 miles high (Is that even possible?Maybe I remember it wrong?) and then dragging the air from the upper levels of the atmosphere down through a funnel. I'm probably misrepresenting what really happened, but whatever it was, it was bad. Lost of damage from the downed trees and flooding. All around not good. I thought I would show you pictures of our neighborhood today, though these really do not do the storm justice.
This is a photo of our local creek. Normally it is pretty shallow, especially in the summer, and not quite as wide as the two openings you see on the bridge in the picture. What you're seeing here is the creek overflowing the banks so that it's about 4 times as wide as normal and about 10 times as deep. Believe it or not, since we didn't have any rain today, the water level actually went down a bit. Yesterday you almost could not see the top of the holes under the bridge.
This is a view of the other side of the road. Again, normally all of this is grassland. Now the park has turned into a lake.
This is what happened to one of our neighbor's trees. Lucky for everyone it fell into the yard, and not on the house or a car or a person! I've seen trees that were split down the middle vertically by lightening or uprooted by the wind, but I've never seen this mature of a tree just snapped in half! It is truly stunning!
And here is a close up, so that you can get a different perspective on the size of this tree. It was huge, and it snapped in half like a twig. Granted, looking inside the trunk it does look like it may not have been the healthiest of old trees, but still! WOW!
Thankfully, we managed to weather the worst of it OK. No water in the basement and no downed limbs. So far we also haven't seen the next wave of storms that are supposed to be passing through. Maybe we'll get lucky and this system will pass us by altogether. I hope so -- we've had quite enough rain this month, thanks!
1 comment:
My husband says it's 6 miles high or 60,000 feet because 60 miles high would be out of the atmosphere. I am married to a non practicing meterologist who loves Tom Skilling.
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