Thunderstorm In Texas

I always find it amusing how Texans are afraid to go to California due to earthquakes, but Californians are afraid to come here due to thunderstorms. Some of my co-workers are happy to say “give me an earthquake any day.” I truly don’t understand this because you can seek shelter from a thunderstorm, but your ass is toast in an earthquake if it’s severe enough. Where are you going to go? If it’s a bad storm or a tornado you can avoid the path. Try to avoid an earthquake.

I once had a co-worker of mine tell me a story about coming to Texas. They were staying at a hotel in the DFW area. A storm rolled in and they went out on the balcony of the hotel to watch it. He said after a few minutes a bolt of lightning came down and split a tree in half about 50 yards away with enough thunder to rattle the windows and stand the hair up on his arms. As he put it, he said “fuck this” and went back inside.

Well, last night we had a good one. It was not only big in terms of physical size, but it was also big in severity. If you’ve ever seen Doppler radar displays of storms you have probably observed that they start off with a light friendly color and then go to yellow and then red if it’s severe enough. Well, last night the swath of yellow and red extended for about 100 miles north to south, and probably 15 miles east to west. On the front of it were numerous rotations and several tornadoes were spawned as a result.

But here is where it gets fun. On the occasional rare occasion you might have seen the radar turn blue or purple. This was the case last night, but it went further than that. It was black. I’m not kidding. The Doppler radar had huge black cells in them where the hail coming down was softball size and straight-line sheer winds were in excess of 100mph with rain coming down at 3+ inches / hr. I figured that they made them black to indicate you were doomed if you were caught in that shit. They might as well have put up little skulls and crossbones in the black part. I’ve never seen black cells before.

I guess I was lucky. I was just south of one of the black cells by a few miles, but got nailed pretty good by the red, yellow, and purple. The rain came down so severely that I couldn’t see across the street, and then it started hailing. Fortunately nothing big, but fairly intense.

From this pic you can get an idea of what I was looking at out of my front door. You can see the hail starting and it raining pretty good. Just to let you know, the reason the sky is blue is not because it was twilight and the sun was going down. This was taken at 9:30pm at night. It was pitch-black with the storm, but I happened to snap this one off right as some lightning lit up the sky.

The next picture is a picture of my back porch (please excuse the mess). It’s kind of hard to tell, but the rain was sheeting over my gutters it was coming down so hard and my yard as well as the porch were flooding. The really sad part? I live on a hill. That’s how hard it was raining.

But hey! I survived and as far as I can tell the only real damage I sustained was that one of my struts on my rooftop antenna came loose. I’ll have to jump up there and fix it. At least my house wasn’t shaken apart and the earth didn’t open up to swallow me whole. I’ll take the thunderstorm.