Massive Storm in Arizona
PostPosted: Tue Oct 05, 2010 7:26 pm
See the fire-pink dots that register just under white under the severe weather doppler scale shown on the left... yep. That's where this story ends up, me in that. So perhaps I should retitle this, Pascal, who loves severe storms, almost gets killed by a storm.
A cold front moving through Arizona today made havoc across the whole state - and I experienced the whole thing! We had a total of about 4-7 rapidly moving storms sweep over us starting this morning at about 12:00 PM. I saw the storms moving up towards us in a train and figured they might bring rain... but I never expected what we DID get.
We were eating out when the first one REALLY hit, the rain hit hard as though the ocean just fell straight out of the sky and landed on our little Chinese food eatery. The water was coming down so hard it flooded under the door-way almost instantly. You couldn't even see across the street with a storm like this.
Just as quickly as it arrived however, it receded and so we headed home imagining that the worst was over. As we came around though, a second wave hit - by the time we got home there was zero visibility. You could barely see other driver's headlights (no car, only their headlights) only about 10-20 feet away and nothing after that. It was as if the entire world was covered in rain. This came down for a while after that rather hard and the temperature dropped down about 20 degrees from the rain (a little chilly in fact, it was 61 degrees at 12:30 PM).
The main storm hit in the late evening however... once again, we were out and about to go see another small rainstorm and had just finished up eating (the rain had stopped by then). As we walked out of the pizzaria however, there was a massive and I mean massive wall-cloud that seemed to stretch from central Phoenix all the way out to us and it was just churning in the air. What is a wall cloud? It looked like this...
(In fact, I told my mom as we turned into the storm and things got dark - "I like the direction you're taking this car, Mom.")
Only it was almost touching the ground and visibly churning in the air. It flickered like a strobe light with little bolts of lightning and the distant mountains were completely covered with the rain - but we figured we could outrun it home in time (I wasn't even sure it was going to hit us, the RADAR hadn't shown anything headed towards us when we left).
However... we no soon turned the corner to start heading home and the sky flipped from a brilliant sunset to dark - dark as night. The storm was far lower then anticipated so that it gave the appearance of being off on the horizon when it was really just a massive cloud on the ground. You knew it was bad when the street lights in the distance start dissapearing one at a time.
Then we hit the wall... and I knew we were royally dead. Mist. Thin mist as though we were hitting water from Heaven's misting system blowing at about 70 M.P.H. But it was so thick the cars on the road came to a crawl because no one could see. Some primordial aspect of my heart turned on and gave me a heads up "you don't see mist blasting by in thick sheets at 70 M.P.H beneath a wall cloud that looks like it's going to drop an F-5 tornado without something- (crack) yep... there it is"
Indeed, no sooner had my mind gone "Oh- snap." when they hit. It sounded like one of those hammers those mean guys in Mario Bros through at you... Yeah, really heavy, really loud and in an instant our car was being permeated in golf ball sized hail and larger... Luckily, we were crawling, because a few seconds into this terrifying snapping of hail and flickering lightning flashing around us like something from the movie Twister, the window went snap. Then it went snap again... it went snap about 5 times before I suddenly realized that I was afraid.
Yes. Fear, and I must admit that I am happy to say that I still have it - apparently it takes tornadic weather to really give me some... or maybe the thought that hail that was ripping tree limbs off and shredding their leaves from their branches like a rain of shuriken blades was about to break the windshield, cover me in broken glass and then proceed to do the same thing on my bare arms and legs. I was also aware of a second thing, I knew I couldn't see down the road, but the wind had no general direction and well - It was obvious to anyone sitting there that we were most likely half an inch from having a tornado hit us or drop on us. I was quite possibly going to die today! >_> Much to my later disgruntlement, my fear didn't say "but I don't want to die!" but instead yelled "Holy thomas crapper, this is really it. I'm going to die, I don't even know how I feel about that."
Which is really a shame, I was hoping it would turn on my "will to live"... but anyways, it was really frightening and I'll take what I can get in terms of emotions. In the future, maybe I can get frightened without leaving the left hand side of the car windshield covered in cracked glass.
The good news is that the storm eventually let up - or maybe the bad news, I mean, if Heaven is as great as they say I could have gone up in a twister! (now that would be a tale to tell) The storm left behind tons of broken trees (some ripped from the ground) and the hail broke tons of windshields (it blew out the window of one of our near-by neighbors) and ripped a metal light fixture clear off a light pole. It also left the street with so much water that you had to drive down the center right down the double line to avoid stalling the car and getting water coming in.*
Overall, it thoroughly washed us out and hit the valley of sun hard. I don't believe I've ever seen a storm of similar caliber out here my entire life. It's also the first time I've ever been really "afraid" in a storm. So it was quite the memory! Also... I still love really nasty thunderstorms, that thing got my adrenaline running and right about now I'm thinking "wow, can we do that again!"
*By our house, it also knocked the bumper off someone's car, ripped the screens on our houses, we believe it broke a woodpeckers wings we found hopping around (it certainly shredded his wing feathers alive - we're going to bring him in tomorrow, so keep the little guy in your prayers), dented the cars, knocked a hole in one of our plastic garbage cans and shredded some of our wicker chairs in the back yard.
**Our wall cloud also looked closer to these specimens... I only wish I had my camera so I could have brought everyone here along on the ride.
http://www.wunderground.com/wximage/viewsingleimage.html?mode=singleimage&handle=skasner&number=0
http://www.wunderground.com/wximage/viewsingleimage.html?mode=singleimage&handle=Shutterbug32&number=156
I'm glad everyone is alright ^__^
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