What is your craziest weather event memory?

I've had a couple close encounters with tornados. The first one happened when I was about thirteen years old, in the distant days before weather apps. My family had recently moved to a country place with acreage and we were in the process of having our stable built - the frame was up, but no walls or roof. I was standing in it with a friend discussing what it would eventually look like when the weather went from clear and sunny to grim - yellow skies except for one solid black line of clouds advancing, horizon to horizon. We decided to head back to the house, which was about three hundred yards away.

We had just about reached the future "door" of the barn when a strange black line dipped down from the thunderhead, like a big black witch's finger. "That cloud looks kind of..." I said, and about then it rushed towards us, unimaginably fast and loud. We didn't try to run because there was no time, we just stood there under the sky in the framework of the open barn and stared. About thirty feet from us, the tornado turned and went up the lane beside the barn, ripping the tops off the giant pine trees lining the lane and leaving them all twisted and splintered. It was just about the width of the lane, and never did quite touch down, just went by at treetop level. In less than five minutes it dissolved, and then the rain started, big, pelting rain.

My friend and I just stood gawping at each other. We didn't summon up the gumption to run for the house for several moments. The feeling of awe and helplessness in the face of something so big and fast isn't one I will ever forget.

My other close encounter was more recent, but still several years ago. The tornado which killed three people in South Memphis before hitting the already decrepit but still open Hickory Ridge Mall finally petered out and died about fifty yards from our house, scattering pieces of mall insulation all over our roof and yard. We drove around the neighborhood afterward and plotted the course from the debris, and it seems to have tracked in a straight line from the mall through some local businesses then across the Nonconnah Creek to the back end of our property.

In more pleasant memories, I have seen Green Flash, while boating with my parents, at sunset. Truly beautiful and I wish everyone could see it. Another good one is seeing twenty-three degree effect, which is a circular rainbow around the sun, with a silvery disk in the middle. I was visiting my sister in California at the time, and the rainbow was on the news, with local people wondering if it was an alien invasion!

I've never really been in any catastrophic weather but one thing that stands out to me is when I tried to cross the Georgia Straight in a 28' Bayliner Sunbridge weekend cruiser and everything was going fine. Gorgeous day, nothing reported on the weather radio. Then it starts to really swell up kind of out of nowhere, of course the weather station reports NOW about an incoming shift in wind patterns. The swells were absolutely *kitten* insane and it just got worse, and worse, and worse. We got hit with a pretty quick intense storm and I had to slow the boat right down to like 3-5mph almost nothing just to maneuver the boat to prevent us from capsizing ..into the swell which seemingly was going all over the place. It took us a solid hour of struggling through that storm to come out of it alive, but shaken. I thought for sure that's how I was going to go.

*KITTEN* YOU MOTHER NATURE YOU'RE MEAN

Avocado_AS5 wrote: »

This little baby tornado was a couple miles from my house last year. It was only an EF-0 and did no damage. That was the day I was trying to get a puppy who was stuck in my car wheel free, as the tornado sirens were going off and I was getting hammered by hail. My daughter was trying to get the pup to come out of the wheel when she looked up in the sky and we both saw the twister.

These things are fascinating.

I was stationed in Okinawa in 1974. A typhoon passed through. I was from Southern California and had never seen anything like it. We were restricted to the barracks, but I went outside and threw a full trash barrel into the air. It did not come down.

Crazy weather is a regular occurrence where I'm from in Wyoming. The wind contributes to most of it. Hurricane force winds in central Wyoming happen all the time. I remember vacationing in Florida one time seeing the In-Laws. We all went to this science museum. There was an exhibit wind tunnel that was supposed to show you what it was like to be in hurricane force winds. It blew I think up to about 96 MPH. There was a picture taken where my DH and I just sit there looking unsurprised, and next to us his parents are in shock by the wind machine. 96 MPH winds is called Tuesday in these parts! (Only a slight exaggeration). It's not uncommon to have days with 40-50mph sustained winds with gusts between 76-120MPH. That's just average. I've heard of gusts in localized areas much higher then that. It blows trucks over all the time, knocks signs over, tears shingles off roofs, rips buildings trailer houses apart sometimes during bad storms. Combine that with a snow storm, and you have yourself a nasty blizzard! People out here joke that they fall over when the wind actually quits blowing. The trees in my area all grow with a lean instead of straight up and down.

SuperOrganism2 wrote: »

TheRoadDog wrote: »

I was stationed in Okinawa in 1974. A typhoon passed through. I was from Southern California and had never seen anything like it. We were restricted to the barracks, but I went outside and threw a full trash barrel into the air. It did not come down.

Where you an army artillery person by chance? My grandfather was in Okinawa for a good stretch but I think by that time he was doing missile stuff back in the USA. He and my mom talked about tsunamis that came...very, very sad. People didn't understand what was happening when all the water went out to sea and they had a really bad time.

I was in the Marine Corps. Telephone & Teletype Tech.

Earthquakes are becoming a more frequent thing in Missouri (yikes) and the first and biggest one I ever experienced was about three years ago. We were living in a duplex temporarily and just had a new neighbor move in. Saturday morning at 7:30 am the doors of our bedroom and bathroom started shaking & rattling. I was like "WTH is this new neighbor doing over there that is so loud and crazy?" Turned out she wasn't even at home and it was a quake.

Halloween blizzard of ‘91. Only kids out in the neighborhood so people were dumping their entire bowls of candy into our pillow cases.