For me, it was when the remnants of Hurricane
Fran hit Outside of Philadelphia back in 1996.
I was in the hardest hit area (Abington). There
was very rotten weather the whole afternoon of
that day, some flooding, lots of storms, but
the "main" one that came that evening sticks
in my mind. I remember walking out of my bedroom,
my mom was in the basement doing laundry. I
unplugged my 286 (that I logged onto my Unix shell
account and programmed with , and walked into the
living room. Suddenly, there was this extremely fast wind gust, that seemed to blow *around* the
house, almost as if a tornado was forming around it, the power failed, came back on breifly, then
went out again, and everything went to hell.
I screamed to my mom downstairs that I thought a
tornado was forming around the house, but I was
kind of paralized in shock (not so much fear,
but shock). There was wild lightning, extremely strong winds, and very heavy rain, which went on
for a couple hours. when I looked out my bedroom
windows, All I could really see was very bright
flashes, very reminicent of the storm cellar
scene in "Twister". Trees snapped, a dranage
channel over flowed and was *gushing* like a
wild river into some poor neighbors yard,
buildings were flooded and damaged, a Youth center
at a local park collapsed while a dance was being held in it (thankfuly nobody hurt in that), but
an edlderly couple died when their basement
flooded . The storm let up, and when we
and our neighbors walked out, the damage we saw
was incredible. We say the dranage ditch that was
still gushing, part of a tree landed right next
to a neighbor's car just a couple doors up, and
power was out everywhere. The storm started back up about a half hour later, but I don't think it
was as bad as the first part. Late that night, I
saw what appeared to be sparks around the aluminum
framed window in my bed room, and there was reports from fire fighters the next day of the
air being so charged up, that they were getting
shocks from their trucks.

L.A. Thunderstorms 1980. I was at school so we could go to a colorguard competition. It got cancelled because of the rain. A friend tried to take me home. I started 2 miles from home. Wound up 10 miles from home, and had to spend the night elsewhere.

Meanwhile, my mom was driving down the street, when a wall of mud hit her car. She nearly drowned but some neighborhood kids saved her. They wound up staying at our house...

Bad storm...

Late '90's, in August (I forget the exact year), Universal Studios in Florida. We were standing in the middle of the parking lot, out in the open, waiting for the bus back to the hotel, with a deluge of rain and forks of lightning all around us. We couldn't stay under a shelter, because then the bus would have left without us, and there wasn't going to be another one that day. I usually like to watch thunderstorms, but this one even had me scared!

Any day on Feranginar is wild enough for me thank you.

Ages ago (OK, it was in 1987), I was employed at a grocery store, and one evening I had to get a bunch of carts (or whatever you call those wheeled things you put groceries in ) in from the parking lot (or car park). ANYWAY, a huge thunderstorm was fast approaching, so I and another guy were rushing to get the carts in before the rain burst from the turbulent sky, while dodging cars driven by people who had little regard for us.
The lightning got to be pretty frequent, so much so that it made a weird strobe light effect on the landscape. The thunder was a constant rumble, with nearby hits cracking loudly. "This is like something out of a nightmare!" I said aloud to no one in particular.
As I manhandled a line of a dozen or so carts toward the store entrance, I glanced back at the other guy, who was also pushing a line of carts from further out in the lot. Suddenly, a blinding flash of white light and a nearly simultaneous blast of sound startled me; a lightning bolt had hit a light pole in the lot near my coworker. I don't remember if he abandoned his carts or not, but I do remember he was by my side in just a few seconds after the blast. "I'm done!" he declared as we got inside. "I felt that charge through the carts!"
The rain then came down in a torrent, but the lightning actually subsided shortly thereafter, and the storm moved on after an hour or so with no damage that I can recall.
That wasn't actually the most wild or bizarre storm I've encountered (I was a weather spotter for a time several years after that one, and have seen some intense stuff), but the near-miss I witnessed was very intense and has stuck with me all these years.

A few years earlier, I did see a beautiful storm approach at night from my bedroom window. As I lay awake in bed, I thought I saw a flash outside. I went to my north-facing window, and noticed all the stars to the north were blotted out by an enormous thunderhead, which flashed intermittently. As the storm aproached, the flashing got more frequent, lighting up the clouds; it almost looked like a photographic negative. Occasionally, I'd see a streak of lightning within the clouds or from the clouds to the ground, but they were a dull orange due to distance and intervening moisture in the air. As the storm closed in, the lightning bolts occurred more frequently and became whiter, and I could finally hear distant rumbling of thunder. Eventually, more distinct thunderclaps rang out. By the time the storm actually hit my house, over an hour had passed. It only lasted about a half hour or so before moving on, but what a spectacular light show during and after! As it moved away, I went to the house's south side and watched some awesome forked cloud-to-cloud lightning.
I was so charged up (no pun intended) that sleep was out of the question. I turned on the tv in time to watch a special news broadcast of the first night launch of the Space Shuttle. (Another year had me watching a Star Trek episode after a storm; this was pre-The Next Generation, when ST was only shown late at night.)

Four years ago, I was intalling curtain rods in an upstairs corner of the house with a portable electric drill. I wasn't worried because it was only just starting to rain and it was the last rod. I saw a bright light, and suddenly found myself on the floor with my right hand tingling. The battery in the drill I was using was dead, and the television next to me hasn't worked right since. My right hand ached for weeks after this.

Not as exciting as Merat's story, but our VCR never worked properly again after being struck by lightning in 1996.

That's quite a close call, Merat. Glad you're still with us!

I had a close call once too. I was driving home from work when lightning hit a electric pole nearby. I heard the bang simultaneous with the flash and slammed on the brakes. Good thing too as the wires where in the road and the top few feet of pole was missing.

OK, a new one...
Around 36 hours ago, I was driving toward a small town and noticed extremely dark, menacing storm clouds racing toward the area I was about to enter. I turned on the radio, and surprisingly, one of the local stations actually interrupted the song being played to announce a tornado warning (meaning a tornado has been sighted and/or detected on weather radar) for the county I was in... usually, radio stations wait for a song to end before making such announcements!
Anyway, as I entered the town, I saw local emergency trucks being dispatched, most likely to position weather spotters around the town to act as a visual early warning system should a tornado approach. A moment later, the county warning sirens in town blasted. I looked at the sky, noting wild, broken clouds descending from the rain-free base of the main storm, but did not see any rotating wall cloud, nor any rotation of any kind. There was minimal lightning and no rain, but the wind was gusting.
As I got partway through town, rain started, and a couple blocks further along, I noticed hail was hitting my vehicle's roof. Not the tap, tap, tap noise little pellets of hail typically make, but Bam! Bam! Bam! I contemplated for about a milisecond parking under a tree, but ruled it out first due to becoming a target for lightning, and second for becoming crushed within my vehicle should the tree fall.
I drove on past the last house on the block, wondering if I should have tried to see if anyone was home ("'Scuse me, could I please take shelter in your basement?"). The next building was the town's fire station, and at this point, the rain and hail became so intense that I had difficulty seeing the road. I pulled over behind a parked pickup truck (one belonging to one of those emergency workers dispatched just a few minutes before) and rolled up my driver's side window. (The open window was on the lee side of the vehicle, so I initially wasn't getting rained upon.) The banging on the car roof from the dime- to quarter- sized hailstones was furious, and just before I got the window shut, a hailstone came in through the opening and smashed a hole into the plastic covering of the vehicle's instrument panel. A second later, another hailstone shattered my outside mirror in an explosion of glass and ice.
I looked at the ground and saw golfball sized hailstones all around, and was nearly deafened by the now continuous Bam! BAM! BAM! on the roof. The wind was driving the rain and hail down at a 45 degree angle, and shook my vehicle. I was stuck: make a dash for the fire station and risk getting a concussion on the way, or stay with my vehicle while what might be a tornado flipped it away.
When's the first window going to break? Why hasn't the hail stopped yet, and why is it getting more intense? That usually happens just before or after a tornado forms, doesn't it? And how will I see anything coming anyway? I can barely see the fire station just across the street. At least the guys in there are watching me; I figured they'd wave me in if they thought I had to abandon my vehicle. (But why are they using flashlights? Oh, it's dark inside the building. Power's out.)
BAM! BAM! BAM! BANG!! BAM! BAM!
Windows still intact, no debris flying around outside, if I live through this, I wonder if my insurance will cover all the damage the vehicle must be taking...
After several minutes (more than five, fairly close to ten I estimate), the hail finally started to subside. I picked up from the floor the hailstone that had smashed into the instrument panel, opened the window a crack, and almost casually chucked the stone outside. It had been almost an inch in diameter, even after melting slightly, and was nearly spherical.
The rain subsided, along with my fear. Yeah, even though I knew what was going on, even though I knew what to do given certain circumstances, I was a bit scared. Scared of not knowing what was actually happening, and thus not being able to know what course of action to take. Is there actaully a tornado, or just straight-line wind? How fast (aside from my own estimates), what direction, how long before I'm in really bad danger? The radio stations in the area just kept repeating the generic warnings, with no real specific information. I had no weather radio nor phone, and in spite of relative safety being just a few meters' dash away, I had been trapped. Scary indeed. (Not panic-inducing, mind you, but trust me, I've never felt so powerless!)
A minute later, and the wind was gone, the rain steady, the hail finished. I looked at the ground, noting that none of the hailstones were small (other than the broken fragments, of course). There was little more for me to do but pull back onto the road and try to get to my destination, the next town ten minutes down the highway.
Lightning and thunder escorted me on my trip, along with the steady rain, but the worst was over.
I arrived at my destination and examined my vehicle's exterior. The roof looked like the moon's surface, all cratered (well, OK, dimpled, but they were huge dimples). Even the vertical columns and some of the sides of the vehicle were damaged. Both tail light covers were shattered, and the rear license plate was bent outward in two different places from impacts. Oh, remember that really loud BANG! amid all the bamming? Huge dent near the back of the roof, just near the rear window. Turns out that there were reports of baseball sized hail hitting that town, and I seemed to have the physical evidence to verify that.
A short while later, I drove throught the town again on the way back. Every tree had lost up to 50% of its foliage, making the ground look like mid-autumn, except that all the grounded leaves were green. There were still places where the accumulated hailstones hadn't melted, resembling fresh snowfall from a distance. Many, actually most, of the town's buildings & houses had windows damaged, and even siding holed; it resembled shrapnel damage from an explosion, only evenly spaced over entire walls. Power was out in town for three or four hours; a tree had fallen, slicing through two power lines.
No one appears to have been injured.
The weirdest thing is that the damage is almost exclusively limited to just that one town, the whole thing, and not very far into the fields beyond the town limits. It's like it was targetted.
So, anyway, that's it, my wildest storm to date. Hopefully the wildest one for a long time.

Wow, that's a story!

Wow thats got to have been extremely so wickedly cool. I've never had anything so neat happen to me like that. Man I wish I coulda been there. Did you get any pictures? That sounds like an awesome experience. And yeah tornados are very good at pciking up one trailer/house/building and leaving the cars parked right next to it alone or other neattricks like that.

I'm glad you survived!

Oh yeah. Sorry. I should have said glad you survied and had a great experience like that.

Thanks, everyone, for your comments. I'm glad I survived, too!
Now, days later, I can say that it was kind of cool, and certainly exciting. But I will also reiterrate that it was scary. If I'd been in a building, it wouldn't have been as bad. Yeah, I know buildings can collapse in severe enough weather, but trust me, weather that might only lightly damage a building can easily toss a vehicle around a tree! If I could have been better prepared for the storm, I would have been calmer, and in a better (safer) position to observe it.

Of course, I didn't have my camera along, either. Not that it would have made much difference; there wasn't much to see during the hail dump, but now that you mention it, I wish I had been able to photograph some of the hailstones (alongside some coins for scale) before they melted.

Anyway, I'd never experienced hail larger than dime-sized before this storm. (I did get a photo of a couple of dime-sized ones alongside some coins, but I haven't taken the film in for processing yet!)
I'll certainly remember this, though, and hope that if any of the rest of you get caught like I did, that you all come through safely! (Be better prepared than I was, and don't take unnecessary risks; no storm is cool enough to get killed for. Those storm chasers you see on tv have generally had years of training and field experience, and also have plans for getting out of harm's way should the weather get too intense. Of course, they make it look easy, which is why some people think they can just drive up to a storm and not get injured.)

Oh, one more thing... straight-line winds can be just as damaging as "mild" tornadoes. So you don't need a tornado to take out power lines, knock down trees or even rip a roof off of a building.

Study storms and respect their power; they're awesome (even cool), but we tiny humans are just a speck in the wind when nature unleashes its fury. I think I missed my calling as a writer for weather documentaries... naw, my style's too dramatic. Still, if I can remind just one person not to be foolhardy about watching severe weather up close, it's worth it. I'm not trying to scare anyone away, so to speak; just remeber, as with anything dangerous, respect that danger and be careful. Oh, and good luck!

>Not as exciting as Merat's story, but our VCR >never worked properly again after being struck
>by lightning in 1996.


Back in 1998, I was in the living room
watching TV, when lightning struck nearby.
I heard a snap from the TV, and the picture
became severely distorted. It "died" a couple
months later. The ironic thing was, is that
it was plugged into one of those cheap
Octipus Outlets^R^RSurge protectors. This
is concrete proof that those surge protectors
will *NOT* protect against lighting strikes.

(lightning just traveled through thousands of feet, perhaps miles of air, which is a
very good insulator. It's not going to be
stopped by the cheap 25cent MOV/shunt/whatever
present in those power strips.)

Cecelia:

---

Quote:

The ironic thing was, is that it was plugged into one of those cheap Octipus Outlets^R^RSurge protectors

---

One day, I was walking to the library trying to
beat an incomming thunderstorm. I could already
hear the rumbles when I disembarked, but I didn't
quite beat it when I walked into the open area
where the library was, and there was lightning
streaking over head with incredibly loud thunder.

I never did that again! :|

A direct lightning strike isn't going to
be stopped by a surge protector, whether
it's $10 or $100. Air is a fairly good
insulator, and the components just can't stop
a bolt that has traveled miles to get to your
wire. This is also why "rubber" tires don't
protect you in a car; the metal shell around
you does scince it acts as a Faraday cage.

A convertable is a *bad* place for a lightning
storm, as well as plastic-bodied cars with very
little metal in the panels. I think Saturns
and maybe Pontiac Transports fall into this
catagory. :|

The distance that the surge pulse has travelled is irrelevent; the protectors are designed to break the circuit upon detecting a surge, so they will indeed prevent it from passing. Where does it go? It's either reflected and absorbed (turned into heat).

The comments about a Faraday cage is incorrect, a Faraday cage prevents certain electromagnetic waves from entering an area, it doesn't stop electrons. Metal is a conductor, which carries electricity on the outside of it, perhaps that is what you meant.

Having known a person who was inside a truck that was struck by lighting I can make the following statement. A car isnt a faraday cage or anything like that what it is is that unless you have seriously damaged the interior most of the interior is isolated electrically from the exterior of the car.
What happened to my friend was the lightning came down and hit him, it fried everything electronic onboard (this was a 96 chevy pickup in the middle of a field) and basically killed the truck. He was temporarily blinded and deafened by the strike but recovered, unfortunately the truck never did.

Last night in Northern Illinois, we had a thunder & lightning storm with sheets of rain. AND THIS IS JANUARY!

Your point? For the past month we've had thunder and lightning and huge sheets of rain (22 inches since 15 December) in Los Angeles.

ScottN: I've don't recall ever seeing thunderstorms in January in Northerm Illinois before. We usually get snow.

Hey I live in southern ohio and it was 70 today with high winds and rain. a few weeks ago it was in the single digits for highs and heavy snow and ice. Strange days are coming.

R, was that truck deisel by aany chance? I've
heard of crankshafts getting welded to the
berrings by a lightning strike. Infact, working
on the truck body/frame with an arc welder can do
the same thing if the engine is part of the current path.


Anyway, being a newer truck, I imagine the
computer got fried, and even so little as a corrupted ROM can disable the engines of todays
heavily computerized engines. :|

Nesezer, yes, surge protectors can protect
against surges-up to a certain amount of
amps/joules. The amount a regulat plug-in
surge protector can protect against is tiny
in comparison to a direct lightning strike,
and lightning will blow through that thing in
order to reach ground. I've heard of lightning
"jumping" from one outlet to another across the
room, among other such bizarre stories. You
can't stop lightning, the only thing
you can do is try to provide the best path
to ground, and keep your equipment from being
a likely pathway. A surge protector/UPS just
won't cut it.

The best thing to do is unplug your stuff, and if
possible, wrap up the cords. Cords can act as an
antenna which picks up strong currents induced
by a nearby lightning strike, which can also
damage equipment.

FYI, Several years ago, I had a 19 inch TV
plugged into a surge protector, that was damaged by a nearby lightning stike. The surge wasn't
even enough to burn out the lights that were on at the time, but the TV made a very loud snap,
the picture became very dull and the set died completely within a couple weeks. It was even
one of those surge protectors with the "up to $25,000 damage coverage" guarantee, but you
would have to *send* the damaged equipment to
them, and hope they would actualy honor their
agreement. The TV was old enough that the
hassle wasn't worth it, and we just got another
one.

%%and even so little as a corrupted ROM
%%can disable the engines of todays heavily
%%computerized engines. :|


Bhech! This is what I get for posting while
recovering from a very bad head cold. :}

.

XAAX: FYI, Several years ago, I had a 19 inch TV
Luigi Novi: Interestingly, on the Last Day page, which shows about the first 38 letters/spaces of each new message within the last 24 hours, that message ends at "inch," which may prompt curiosity about what the rest of it says.

No it was gasoline. He says he was glad it wasn't hollywood otherwise he would have been blown into the next seven states. As for the electrical system Most of the wiring looked like so much charred and melted crud. So I couldn't tell you if there was any corruption to the roms or not, mainly because we coulndt find enough of them to tell. he wound up selling the truck for scrap after the insurance wouldnt pay to fix it. Somethign about lightning not being covered by their policy.

And I was goign to mention somehtign about how that 19 inch message came out.....

Here's another experience, but it doesn't really top my last one...
I have a fairly long-ish commute to my job, made even longer by detours due to road construction. (Hey, I didn't realize it was Construction Season already... I thought that started in late April!) Yesterday (no, wait, it's after midnight local time, so that should actually read two days ago), a series of storm cells was blasting through the state, one after another, from my destination all the way up to my home and beyond. The first cell had just arrived at home as I was leaving, but according to reports, the worst stuff was in my drive path, and the closer I would get to my destination, the worse the weather would get.
As an added bonus, the "safe route" around the storms was miles out of the way, and would result in me being fairly late for work. So, punch through the storm & maybe be late due to downed trees & power lines, or bypass the hazard and be late for sure?
I chose the riskier path and took my normal route. I knew what to watch for and had live weather tracking on the radio (much better coverage than that storm last August; kudos to the radio station!). I still didn't have a phone, but figured I'd need to concentrate on my driving anyway. At least I wouldn't have to worry about my vehicle getting damaged any worse than it had been last August. (Yep, I still have it; the repair guesstimates exceeded the vehicle's value, so I just left it as is. Looks like crud, but it's a 'good runner' as some people say.)
To make a short story long, uh, I mean a long story short, I didn't see any of the funel clouds or tornadoes that the radio was reporting, but I did get caught by a big hail dump that covered everything in about an inch thick layer of pea-sized hail and slowed traffic to a crawl for several miles. After that, the precipitation stopped, revealling some spectacular rolling, boiling clouds. I actually got some photos this time (brought the camera along in case I saw anything interesting), and eventually got back up to speed.
Just before reaching my destination, I ran into the next cell, which was moving faster (nasty cross-wind!) but didn't dump more hail on me. I did see a hook-like cloud drop out of the cloud base, but it dissipated before I could observe any rotation (if there even was any). Still, it was a startling sight, because it appeared just near where I'd driven round a curve not even a minute earlier.
Anyway, I made it to work shortly thereafter, just a few minutes late, but safe. The next couple of hours treated me and my coworkers to some nifty cloud-to-cloud lightning and more rain, plus one more storm cell that was so small, we could see clear sky behind it (through the rain, even) while the lead edge was just passing overhead. (The lead edge, by the way, had a fantastic looking--and long--shelf cloud, but it was too dark at that point for any photography.)

On February 23,2003 there was a snow and ice storm
in New Hampshire,lightning flickered and some
thunder rumbled,wildest thunderstorm I have ever
seen.Oh,and the temperature was only 27 degrees!

March of 1985, the Thursday before Spring Break started at the University of Maryland, and the school is already half-empty. Those of us on staff at the campus radio station and the newspaper watch from the top floor of the South Campus Dining Hall while a light snow starts falling about 11 in the morning. By 1PM we had a couple inches, and it is coming down like gangbusters.

Our Sales Manager at the radio station comes in toting two 12-packs of Michelob. "There's a sale at [liquor store who's name I don't remember] on Michelob!" Seeing as the sale price is lower than buying a comparable amount of Mickey's or Pabst, the Promotions Director and I collect monies, and volunteer to make a run, if only we can find his car in Lot 3, a sprawl of student cars and asphalt and now snow.

Dressed in March-appropriate jackets and no gloves or hats, we fight blizzard-like conditions searching for Brian's car. Suddenly there's a flash of pink light. "What was that?" Brian asks, just as the thunderclap hits us. "Holy [stuff that comes out of the back of a cow]! Pink lightning!" we both shout, as flash after flash occurs, and the thunderclaps overlap. We beat a hasty retreat back to the station, where we wait until the lightning part of the storm passes to get our celebratory libations, and then have a HUGE snowball fight in the hallways that pitches the Diamondback and WMUC staffs against the yearbook and MaryPIRG staffs.

This happened in LA in early 2005 during a particurly nasty series of winter storms that hit the area. I was watching a heavy storm outside through a window in my apartment building. Suddenly, there was this weird reddish glow from my side of the street, which reflected off of the building across the street from me. This lasted for a couple seconds before disappearing with a pop. It might had been ball lightning, but I could not tell for sure as it was out of view, but my neighbor said he saw something weird through his window.