What is your most memorable storm?

There is nothing cooler than seeing a summer thunderstorm roll across the open desert.

 

Winter 2005. It was an ice storm in N.C. Power lines down all over the place, and I get a sudden craving for Starburst and Apple-Cinnamon Cheerios. So, deep-thinker that I am, I decide to trek to the store to get some. The store was right around the corner, but because of the downed lines and generally lousy road conditions, it ended up taking me about 45 minutes to make the trip. BTW, the store had a backup generator, so I was able to get my Starburst and Cheerios.

 

I lived in Kansas for years and years, so I've seen my fair share of storms. My most memorable storm could be one of the two where lightning struck my house (one was at 5 a.m. and it shook my bed...in the basement.)

... it could have been the one before we moved into the house, so we had no basement at the time and there was funnel clouds being dropped everywhere in the northern part of my county and my mom ended up having to drive like a bat out of hell trying to get to my aunt's house. The winds were so violent they were shaking the car while we were driving down the highway.

... then there was the ice storm this past winter. Hit during finals week and laid 2 inches of ice on everything. No one in town had power but slowly, but surely, the power started to come back on. Our neighbors across the street had power within 24 hours of it going out. Most of town had it within 48 hours. My house? Five days and 17 hours. Plus, it was about 20 degrees outside. I lasted two nights in the house (and that second night was COLD, let me tell you. We piled all of the blankets in the house into one big mass of blankets in the living room. I slept with two pairs of pants, two pairs of socks, a short-sleeved shirt, a long-sleeved shirt and a hoodie on and contemplated sleeping in my shoes.) before one of my friends got power back on at her house and I slept on her couch for the rest of the week.

Of course, I've recently moved out of Kansas. Less than two weeks after I moved away, an F3 hit the town next to mine where my entire family went to high school and pretty much leveled 80 percent of the town. Then, the same storm spawned an F4 that hit my university and wreaked all sorts of havoc on my campus. That one was a hard one to hear about and then look at the pictures of.

The sad thing is...I sort of miss all of the major storms. Here in Kentucky, they don't get anything NEAR what we did in Kansas. I have never lived in a place where all of the houses come pre-equipped with basements and the tornado sirens go off on a fairly regular basis...and not because they're testing them.

 

The Blizzard of '96 was pretty impressive, but for me, it was a microburst in the late spring of 2000. I was a junior in high school, and the school year was just about over. The storm was just nasty all around--a buddy and I had just come inside from shooting some hoops, and we knew it was going to be nasty-the sky just had that look. Anywho, the whole town got it bad, but the burst was litterally right over our neighborhood; my neighbors and I lost four trees combined. One was in our driveway, and one just missed our porch, which my parents had just vacated. After it was over, a few of my buddies and I walked around the area trying to help out in any way we could. For a town in Connecticut, the storm was unlike anything I had ever seen before.

 

Without sharing my personal details of said storms:

Hurricane Alicia and Hurricane Rita

I don't like hurricanes. But I won't leave home when one hits.

 

I was in Jr. High in Seattle on that day also. That shit scared the hell out of me

 

Wow, that's weird.

 

Second Hurricane Isabel. I figured I was inland enough given that it was going to make landfall pretty far south in North Carolina that by the time it got up here, it'd be a lot of rain, a little wind and pretty much just a nasty evening.

Instead, we got a lot of wind (borderline hurricane-force sustained with cane-leve gusts), a lot of rain, and because we had a wet summer, a motherfuck-ton of downed trees. Given that I lived in an apartment as part of a house surrounded by hundreds of trees, it was a very stressful night.

The creepiest part was the next day. I realized that this power outage wasn't getting fixed in a few hours, like most of them tend to be, and I went to a drugstore to pick through the last of their batteries.

On the way there, I passed a Shoney's that had caught fire. When I got out of the drugstore, it got a lot worse, so I walked over to the scene, where at least a thousand people must have been, all watching. Not only did we not have power, but no water pressure either. So the only fire trucks that could do anything outside crowd control were the pumper trucks, which went to a nearby lake to fill up, then return to do what they could. But it wasn't much.

The fire then raced across the roof from the kitchen to the dining area, and that's when the firefighters threw up the white flag and focused on containment. And we all watched that Shoneys burn, blow out windows, then collapse in degrees until eventually it was a massive pile of flaming rubble.

Then we all moved on. It was getting dark. And nobody had power.

It was going to be a long night.

 

When I was in college in 2002, we had an F-1 tornado hit the campus. As usual, when the tornado sirens went off, some of the members of one of the fraternities were outside mocking it, making their own siren sounds. They did this the first time the sirens went off. The second time they were outside to mock the sirens again until the leaves on the ground went into the air and started spinning. Every person out their ran into the dorms just in time to hear the tornado going by above us. I was in a bathroom with eight other guys. This is a Christian college, so my swearing was mixed in with other people's praying. It touched down a little farther down on campus, blowing out these 15-foot tall windows on a building. With huge shards of glass barely hanging on at the top of the window, people were going underneath the glass to look up at it. Dumbasses.
Fast forward to 2003. We were fortunate enough to not get hit by a tornado that hit about 10 miles south of us that killed nin people, but we did get some really bad hail. Cars and windows took a beating. My truck's glass wasn't cracked or broken, but it had $3,800 worth of damage to the body.
Fast forward to February of this year. I'm at the paper in the town where I graduated college, and a huge fucking tornado slams into the campus and demolishes most of the dorms. Miraculously, no students were killed. My girlfriend was supposed to be in class that night at the campus, but class was canceled about two hours before the storm hit. Thank God her professor said go home and she had time to get to her house. Another professor didn't cancel his class before-hand. No one was hurt in that building, but the twister hit it and the parking lot outside. You can imagine those students (all graduate students) were a little pissed off at that professor.

 

93 snowstorm that pretty much crippled the south. We got about a foot of snow.

Katrina. I was in Jackson when it hit, then saw the damage two days later on the Coast.

 

I would place money on your storm being the same one I posted about earlier on this page. That was a monster.

 

If you were anywhere on the east coast in March 1993, you're all talking about the Storm of the Century. We got knocked the fuck out by it too.