Earlier, a nice big storm pased just north of my nice country homestead. I'll say...6:00?

6:45 me and mother leave to go get my friend, it begins to rain. WTF, the storm's coming BACK at us, heading south and west (it was going north and east). So we get to my friends house in the adjacent town. Not good, it's really raining now. He gets in the car, says that they REALLY got it hard, even some hail there. So we go start to go back.

By now the windshield wipers are going full blast and we hear the tornado siren going off. We drive out of town, undable to see, and make a U-turn and head back to his house, and now it's hailing, raining like hell, and thundering. We get to his house, there's a 2 INCH PUDDLE right outside my car door that wasn't there 7 minutes ago. We RUN to his house, and jump inside. It's getting really, really dark outside now. We wait it out (we went back about 7:15) and finally decide to leave (AFTER power goes out there) around 8-ish.

I would like to state my dad had no idea where me or my mom were. He thought we'd be home by 7:30, and our phone was dead so we couldn't call him to tell him we were waiting it out.

So we leave, it's not raining as hard (still hard), it's thundering, tornado watch is over, and half the streets in the town are flooded. I **** you not, in 45 minutes half the streets flooded with atleast 6 inches of water. We manage to go through the town slowly, and get out onto the highway. It's still very, very dark (but lighter than it was during the brunt of the storm, even though it's now later) and there's a huge lightning show going on. It reminded me of the shot in Saving Private Ryan with the guys walking on the ridge, and the lightning going on behind them.

So we get on the highway. Going about 20 - 30 mph, go through atleast 2 flooded sections, and then turn onto Route 1. There was gravel from 20 feet away strewn onto the road here, mud everywhere, flooded in 2 or 3 places. It was ****in' scary, guys.

We turn onto our road, which goes down a hill with a little area with two ponds on either side at the bottom of the hill. We were praying (I was seriously praying) that the road wasn't flooded out. It wasn't thank God, and we get home and look at our driveway. After the storm, my dad went and stepped it out (around 8:45, we got home 8:30 finally) and we had gravel thrown 50 FEET down the road!

That was the scariest storm of my life. I wouldn't have been near as scared if I didn't hear that they saw funnel clouds forming over the general area over my house. Luckily, no tornadoes that I know of.

Oh, and the main town? North side is just completely worked over. The roof off of an old school gym was thrown off, if that tells you anything. 10+ power lines down, numerous roads flooded, the town is going to be Hell for a while until we get this straightened out. And then there's the Marathon refinery. It's going to be a mess because of this, and the emergency response people are going to have their hands full for quite a while.

I've been a little freaked out for the past 5 hours, when this all started the worst. If possible vibe a bit for my town and area (Crawford County, Illinois) that it gets better. We have NEVER had anything this bad, or to this degree ever before.

So..yeah. That was my evening from 6:00 to 8:45.

Zlocista

You dont know what a bad storm is. I got hit by Katrina, AND Rita. I had to evacuate, even.

That's not the point. The point being that this area has never gotten anything this bad within the last 15 years, atleast, so it hit us VERY hard.

How about we post some pictures of cool storms? I took this picture last year in my front yard as some sort of weird storm front was passing overhead. I lightened it up a bit; the flash went off so it was a bit dark:

meh... at least it was exciting and no one got hurt. The mountains around my house are so full of rain, there are mudslides like crazy and people getting killed in them. We have had like 200% of the normal rainfall this year.

And we have a drought....

Damn you

[R.I.P Underdogs ]

That's a sweet pic.




Tell me about it. I'm sick of all this rain.

That's what I love about Oregon; we're pretty temperate, though it rains alot. But aside from an occasional heavy downpour with hail, minor thunderstorms, some flooding, and pretty heavy winds sometimes, we don't get much brute weather. (then again, I can't speak for people living on the coast.) The worst I've ever had is my fence get blown down in '96 by a crazy windstorm. We've never ever had a tornado, like...ever. So I feel sorry for you tornado valleyers, it's gotta be tough.

Cincinnati sees flash floods like that on a weekly basis in April. In addition, I had a tornado rip through my neighborhood, missing my house only by a tenth of a mile. It was an F4 when it passed through, and it ran for many miles, hovering between F3 and F4 the whole time. Scary as crap.

Motion seconded!

Outdoor sporting events seem to bring out the worst weather. The first one is at an airfield at Räyskälä where we were watching motorcycling on the Finnish Championship level.

The other two were taken within 8 minutes of each other at the 2005 World Championships at the Helsinki Olympic Stadium in August. Horrible weather. The seats that weren't under a sun-shade emptied quickly. Thunder, lightning and a torrential downpour. Pitch dark sky at 6pm... 1 hour delays in scheduling.

Alright, so I know this is normal weather for some of you, and I know that it wasn't the worst that could possibly happen, but this is rare for our area. I'd call my dad and ask him what the town looked like on his way into work, but he's in meetings all day.

I just went out and looked at our driveway. Reason only the left side is washed out is because it's lower than the right side. Pictures in a minute







The place where our little back road was expected to be flooded is just out of the picture on the left, about 10 feet further along that road.

I think that was supposed to be artillery. :p

And, yeah. Tornados and hail seem to be a regular order of the day here. :/

I hate tornadoes. Fortunately I live in Oklahoma, and we don't even see rain.

We've had some storms recently but nothing much in the way of rain. We've actually had a little in the last month, but not much since August.

I never been in a hail storm. Is it fun?

Not really. It's fun till the hail gets any bigger than a small pebble or ball bearing. Then it's painful.

Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne, Katrina, Rita. I've had a fun 2 years.

[QUOTE=Glyde Bane]Not really. It's fun till the hail gets any bigger than a small pebble or ball bearing. Then it's painful.[/QUOTE]
It was pea sized over here.

BLIZZARD.

I see ground, thats no blizzard

It's always fun when the snow gets deep enough that you can jump off of the roof into the snow. However, it's not quite as fun when the snow gets packed down and you don't realize it before you jump. We rarely get lots of snow, but that happened two years ago and I got an entire week off of school on my birthday, hah.

?

I love storms... not the ones that hurt people, those are bad. But to watch a heavy storm is quite thrilling... I was at my grandparent's once, and they have a little house on Keuka Lake (upstate NY), basically in the middle of nowhere. The lake is shaped like a Y, and the house is on the water below a bluff (they are on the inside of the top of the Y, and the bluff is basically a 50 foot cliff, just not as steep in most places, but it is vertical in others). Anyway, it was a huge thunderstorm a few years back, tons of lightning and torrential downpour. The Fire Department (it only had two trucks for the upper part of the lake) came out and was putting down sandbags along the road in strategic locations (the road ran along the top of the bluff). Meanwhile I was staring at the bluff side through the doorway, observing a mixture of mud and water rushing into the lake. Right outside on the patio was about 4 inches of rushing mud. I cannot believe that nothing substantial slid down the bluff. Afterwards, the water and the road was covered in junk and washed out in places.