I’ve written about storms a few times in this site’s history. Here are three past examples:

Some New Action

Storm Chasing

The Lost Week

Time for another entry in one of my favorite things to write about.


It’s been awhile since we spent a night in the basement. We broke that drought last night.

For two days the weather folks had been warning of serious storms Wednesday night into Thursday morning. After a stormy start to Wednesday, the sun popped out, the humidity jumped up, and it felt like the classic June day where the sky would turn black and just dump rain at some point. I kept checking the forecast – because that’s what I do – and it kept saying the overnight hours would be the worst. When I went to bed around 11:30, the storms were projected to hit us between 3:00 and 4:00. I set my mental alarm to wake me at the first clap of thunder.

That came right around 1:00. I turned on the TV, saw a radar that was bright red across the entire northern half of the state and dropping our direction. Then I heard the weather folks talking about 100 MPH winds. Then 110 MPH. Then “in excess of 120 MPH.” I was a little groggy, but that snapped me awake. Those winds were at least an hour away, but with dozens of large trees right next to our house, it was time to get everyone into the basement.

I woke S, who woke M and C, and I carried L down to the basement, where we all crashed on our sectional with the TV on to follow the storms’ progress. The girls stayed awake for quite awhile. That first storm, which calmed down a bit and only had 70–80 MPH winds as it passed through our county, completely missed us. But two more were lined up behind it.

Storm #2 produced a small tornado one county away. Between 2:00 and 3:00 we had a solid 15 minutes of heavy, if smallish, hail. The radar kept showing “tornadic rotation” right on top of us, but there was never a tornado warning or sirens. Our basement is completely underground, so the sound of the wind rarely reaches down there. When I popped upstairs to check on things, you could hear it roaring. Or maybe that was just the massive amount of rain that was pouring over the edges of our gutters. Regardless it was loud.

The next round came through around 4:00. The winds died way down, and it was just torrential rain. S went back upstairs around then, and I slept on the couch until about 4:30, when I was sure the threat was past and reasonably sure our power would stay on. The girls ended up staying downstairs until nearly 9:30 this morning.

Our yard and driveway are a mess of leaves and small branches, but nothing major came down. There were reports of large trees blocking a major road not too far away. We seem to have escaped without harm. Ironically I’m getting bids to put a new roof on. I’m glad a tree didn’t crash through our house, but I would not have been sad if we had bigger hail that put our insurance company on the hook for the replacement cost.