A tornado spawned essentially on top of my house in June and applied enough torque to fuck up my foundation. One corner of my house is coming off now. I’m fighting my homeowners insurance to cover it and I have a foundation expert coming out tomorrow to give me estimates for the costs of repairs. My cousin from ohio knows all about real estate, so he gave me and my mom so many tips for how to get the insurance to cover it. I requested a new adjuster for a second opinion yesterday and one should be contacting me next week.
This whole thing has me freaking out and more severe storms have rolled through and made it worse. The whole right side of my house has shifted on top of the one corner coming off. Found more cracks in the wall of the finished basement today. We had a crazy storm yesterday, which probably cause the cracks.
March 1993: The Storm of the Century. It caused snow to fall in every part of Georgia. From the mountains down to the Florida line.
In the north Georgia mountains it caused a thunder blizzard. High winds, lightning, and 3+ feet of snow in a matter of hours. This is in a part of the country that rarely gets a dusting of snow. 10s of thousands of trees down. The sound of pine trees snapping in the middle of the night sounded like cannon’s being fired. Power was out for more than a week in many places in the mountains. It took four days for me to get a clear path cut from my home to the main road.
The first shower I had in more than a week was when I made it down to Atlanta for the Grateful Dead shows.
Worst: Driving through a large Midwest city in the US on the freeway. Started raining. NBD. Then it got a lot harder. The wind really picked up fast. I’ve been around gust fronts and the like for thunderstorms before, this was unlike anything I’ve been through before. It got wild, fast. Tree parts and other debris started blowing past, it looked like what you’d think a tornado would, but it was far too widespread. Then the crazy thing…along with the wind, rain, and debris, the visibility dropped to near zero with a fog or mist in the span of a minute. We had to pull over and stop with everyone else, nobody could see for a few minutes. I have never seen that happen before, the rapid and violent change to weather and visibility over such a large area.
Coolest: Driving over the western High Desert in the US. Got caught up in a snowstorm with lots of wind. Found a safe place to spend the night after some white-knuckle driving for an hour or two. Plenty of vehicles pushed by wind or slid off the road, we were some of the only stupid ones left driving. No place to park safely, not enough gas for the rest of the night to keep warm. Don’t want to be the dead ones found with CO poisoning by the highway patrol the next day. Anyway, woke up the next day and it was crystal clear, literally. The air was full of fine ice crystals blowing in the wind. The bright sun had a huge halo and cross like a “+” along with some other tangential arcs that felt both close and far away to us at ground level. I’m sure folks in colder climes see these, but it was a new one to me. Pretty wild to see.
To answer the title question… many years ago I experienced a polar vortex that caused about a 100 degree temperature drop in less than 24 hours, that was pretty fun.
To address the body of OP, I would start taking important things out of the house and storing them somewhere safe… but I would think more storms = more damage = more likely the insurance cant deny you.
That’s a crazy temp drop omg. And I’m already packing up important nonessentials to store at my parents’ place. This week is supposed to be good weather-wise until Wednesday, then we’re getting more storms. I’ve gotten like 10.5 inches of rain in the past month alone. The retaining wall beside my house is starting to bow and crack because the ground is expanding so much from the rain. There’s just no drainage for this much water. I’m also on a hill, so I’m not even getting the worst of it all. Most of the water rolling down the road misses me entirely.
Not the worst, but the weirdest happened while I was fishing in Minnesota. We were in a boat on an empty lake. It was a bright clear day without a could in the sky. While we fished we watched a single small black cloud blow over the lake. As we watched, this little lone angry cloud homed in right for our boat. Just before it passed over us, it started dumping rain. It wasn’t more than 100ft wide, but it passed right over us. After that the cloud dissipated and blew away. The weather was totally clear the rest of the day. It was the most personalized storm ever.
Maybe hail. At least one of the times I saw hail. It was a clear and sunny day without a cloud in the sky
Or a wall of rain. Once when I was a kid it was a race to get home: a wall of rain was coming through and I tried to make it back in time to stay dry
Toronto got hail last week, cracked my window, hurricane force winds, on a day that started with slight chance of thunderstorm for one hour in the afternoon.
-40F to +40F in about a four hour period.
Manitoba?
Alaska
blizzard of 78.
so much snow entire families were begging to get out of their homes for it.
Well I’ve got three answers to that.
The most severe weather I sheltered in place from was hurricane Fran. Fortunately it didn’t rearrange my family’s own chunk of the forest too bad but some trees were thrown on a few houses.
The most severe weather I’ve experienced unsheltered was Hurricane Noel. The dumbfuck 20 year old I used to be decided to ride a motorcycle from Daytona to West Palm Beach for no particular reason. I got my giblets rinsed. That wasn’t the most unpleasant weather I’ve ever been in though, I rode that same motorcycle through a freezing rain storm about 3 years later. I kept having to pound my fist into my visor to de-ice it.
The worst aftermath of weather I’ve seen but wasn’t personally in was an EF-3 tornado. It was on the ground for over an hour, it cut a path a thousand feet wide and easily 50 miles long, tearing through forest, neighborhoods and commercial districts. I worked as a flight instructor at a nearby airport, so afterward I got a fairly good look at the damage path from the air. It looked kind of like a logging operation, you know how they’ll take a parcel of land and clear cut it either for development or for the timber? Except smeared across the landscape crossing roads and taking houses and buildings with the trees.
There was one day in my city where a catastrophic hailstorm absolutely brought the city to a standstill. Hail the size of golf balls clogged drains, causing roads everywhere to flood and stopping traffic, but more importantly, dented the skin and smashed the windscreens of like 30% of the cars in the city, writing them off.
I worked for an autoglass supplier at the time, and for the next 2 weeks, we were shipping every bit of glass we could get our hands on until the warehouse was bare. Glaziers were working 16 hours a day to fix the glass on thousands of cars. It was pretty wild.
My car was totaled by a mid-summer hailstorm a couple of years ago. My windshield survived but every body panel was dented to the point that it looked like a golf ball. A couple of miles from my house the hail was baseball size with 2 inch spikes all over it.
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The ice storm in Ontario back in 1998.
I see I’ve got a fellow Hurricane Floyd survivor here. Here’s my story:
I was living in eastern NC at the time. What I remember is they expected the storm to pass through during the night. So we hunkered down, went to bed, I remember waking up a couple times during the night and hearing the wind but I didn’t get up to look.
In the morning I stepped outside and discovered that I couldn’t go anywhere. My apartment was at the top of an incline near a creek and most of what was below us was underwater. So many of my neighbors lost their homes, their cars…the streets were flooded. It was like living on an island. We had no power so I cooked with a little propane camping grill. I remember power being out for a couple days. Only once the power came back on did we realize the full extent of the damage. I vividly remember aerial footage of dead livestock floating in floodwaters.
I worked at a small music store at the time and it got completely gutted. Flood water came in the back entrance, went out the front entrance, and carried almost all our gear away with it. We had to reconstruct the entire interior of the building and purchase all new inventory. We weren’t able to open for business for almost two weeks.
Funny story about that: A few weeks later a guy came in carrying a power amp he said he found about a quarter mile away alongside the highway. He assumed it was ours. We checked the serial number and it was in fact ours, but by that time we had already received insurance and emergency funds and were able to write off almost all the lost inventory. So we said he could keep it. Couple weeks later he came back, said he disassembled it, let it all air dry for a couple days, reassembled it, and it worked fine. Dude scored a $700 power amp for free.
Was in a tornado that tore the roof up and collapsed the building I was in. It’s a miracle I survived. If I wouldn’t have dove into the doorway the walls would have crushed me.
It does, in fact, sound exactly like a train barreling through your living room.
The safest place in my house is a closet in my finished basement. When the tornado that fucked up my foundation extra bad hit, I was in this tiny ass, pitch dark closet with two panicking dogs and the whole house shook and it sounded like a train was in the house with me. I thought I was going to die. Best part is that I was asleep when the tornado alert came through my phone. I booked it downstairs in 30 seconds. Found out later that the tornado was on the ground before the alert went off
That’s intense. Nothing demonstrates our own insignificance like feeling the enormous power of mother nature rolling over our heads.
Yeah. Now I’m dealing with potentially losing my home. My dad is going to be living the RV life in spring. He offered to transfer his mortgage to me or rent his home to me if I need it. I’m honestly hoping that I can get an insurance payout big enough to pay off my home, so I can have his. It would be better accommodating for my slowly worsening disabilities and is less prone to the structural issues my home is. I’m very lucky to have this opportunity and I hope that I can have something work out right for once. I love my home dearly, mind, but it isn’t one that will be good for me as I age. I’ll be thirty next year, but I have the body of someone who is forty. I don’t expect to age well, so I am trying to get my future figured out as best I can while living life as fully as I can.
That’s a tough spot to be in but it looks like there’s a good opportunity there. Hope it works out for you.
Hurricane with 2 week blackout following it.
Tornado but it was a block away - the sky was GREEN. I looked out the window and thought “that’s odd” then my brother called and said there is a tornado by you go take the kids to an interior room (hallway was best we could do). It knocked down a checkers and a car dealership, tossed cars around.
During a heatwave here in the UK earlier this year I was travelling down south. But for 10 minutes out of nowhere we got literal apocalyptic levels of halistones. It sounded like they were going to pierce through the roof of my car. It became hard to see and loads of people actually ended up pulling over just in case. Then it just ended as quickly as it started and 5 minutes later it was so hot again that there was no trace of any water anywhere.
This actually happened again a week or two later, but I was at home so it wasn’t as crazy feeling as it was whilst driving.
