Scariest weather episode you've personally had to deal with?

We lived in a mobile home in a rented lot for the first two years after moving here. One summer afternoon it stormed. A common occurrence in western KY...until I was almost blinded by a blue-white flash of lightning. And heard something that sounded more like an explosion than it did thunder...at the same time as the lightning! All the windows were open, and you could feel a wave of air pressure move through the trailer. I almost shat myself.

After the sun came out I went outside and saw pieces of bark scattered on the street. Across the street, not more than fifty feet away, was a shiny tree. Shiny because it had been stripped of most of its bark by the lightning that had hit it.

That was as close to being zapped as I ever want to be.

About 11 years ago I got a new roof. The neighbor got a new roof, fence and siding. Neighbor behind us got a new house. A F1 tornado came through at about 8pm on a Saturday night. 50 feet to the south and I would have gotten a new house.

I live in the Midwest so storms are nothing special and we hear the storm warning siren go off dozens of times every year. Learned that night to actually pay attention to them.

I'm bad luck with weather, but I also work in positions where I can be exposed to it. I have had close calls with lightning when I worked at a large amusement park and close calls with severe thunderstorms and tornadoes while setting up firework displays in the midwest.

The scariest was probably a few years ago. My son was 6 months old and I was watching a cell that had went through the central part of Indiana with a tornado that hit Kokomo pretty hard. Inl figured I had time to run to the grocery, so I did. As I left the store to go home, more cells blew up in the afternoon heat and I noticed the eerie green sky and rotating scud clouds above. We got in the car quickly and from the highway I saw a massive rotating debris cloud in a field about 1.5 away. It ended up being an EF-4. It struck a rural area, mostly populated by some Amish families. We were very lucky that it didn't come down on the shopping center I was at. There were a few minor injuries among the Amish community, but the bulk of the damage was only to property and livestock. Considering the size of the storm and the rarity of a tornado that large in these parts, it was very fortunate.

About 10 to 15 years ago we were riding bikes on our normal one hour ride. It was a warm summer afternoon and one of those days where a storm developed quickly while we were out. We pedaled hard to get home before the rain, but it started raining about 5 or 10 minutes before we got home. The last stretch is a small hill past a few houses and then our driveway. We get down the hill and pull into the driveway, but the garage door external keypad won't open the door. We had a key, so one of us unlocked the front door and we then realized the power is out. We manually lifted the garage door and pulled the bikes into the garage. We dry off and an hour later the storm has passed. We walk outside and some of the neighbors are milling around as all of us are without power. Then we see why. A huge oak tree (75 - 80 feet tall and 2 to 3 feet in diameter) right next to the road has been knocked down and took out the power lines. It fell on the road we used to get home. It is only a few hundred feet from our house. The tree fell and took out the power after we rode past it, but before we tried to open the garage door. It took maybe 30 seconds between the time we passed the tree and tried to open the door. It was raining so hard that we never heard it come down.

Here in Michigan we get scary ice storms often that take down trees, branches, and power lines frequently. For me the scariest weather happened during the spring. Driving on the freeway I saw a line of hail approaching. Unusually there were a lot of swerving lights inside the line. I quickly found an overpass bridge and pulled under as far as I could. The hail was 2-3” in diameter, golf ball sized. When it had passed, I was one of a very few cars with intact glass.

3" hail? No, that was bad, but not the worst.

Lightning strike less than 50' away*? Attention-getting, but not the worst.

Worst? I'd have to say an EF5 tornado. The warning came over the TV, "get below ground, or die". It scrubbed houses away and left portions of the foundation.

*In much less time than it takes to describe it, there was a lightning strike and almost instantly the thunder. What a silly little word, "thunder". Does not begin to describe the sound, I teleported about five feet to one side when I heard it. But in between the flash and the bang, was a loud "click". Other people that have been close to a strike have also reported a click as well. Wonder what it was?

None.

I’ve been 50 or less feet from a lightning strike. Close enough I felt my hair rise before the flash/thunder, more felt than heard!
Not really scary but really awesome was when I was a teen in Idaho on a clear day we looked out on the horizon and could see a cloud bank. Didn’t think much of it other than “Idaho rain storm coming.” A few minutes later it was obviously very much closer. Stood and watched as it continued to grow closer and closer. Bro went inside and grabbed parents and we all watched as the sky grew darker, birds and animals quieted. The cloud stretched from horizon to horizon and “rolled” across the sky like a giant rolling pin. It was all over in 20 minutes from the time we saw it on the horizon til it was gone on the opposite horizon.
After it passed it was back to clear blue skies.
That was and so far has been my only experience with a roll cloud.

Coming home late one night after partying, it was raining hard. There was a fireman in the street, standing in about a foot of water near our apartment who said we couldn't go that way. Told him it was only half a block to our place and he let us go by. Straight to bed and pretty much passed out. Woke up next morning to no power/gas/water/phone. A block and a half away, the other side of the railroad berm, half the town and several hundred people were gone.

https://www.today.com/video/40th-anniversary-of-s-d-flood-that-killed-238-44476995782
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Black_Hills_flood


Rapid City had the most brilliant response possible to the chance of future flooding: The entire flood plain was scraped clean and turned into parks and golf courses. No housing can ever be built there.

For me it was Hurricane Harvey in late August of 2017. The water just kept coming. And coming. AND COMING! It is the only time in my life I felt abject terror. If I am honest with myself, I still have not fully recovered.

And then, as we're hanging out on the second story of our house the following day, being thankful we were alive, we got this nice little message.



Fun times.

I've lived through Alicia (1983), Allison (2001), Ike (2008), Harvey (2017), and Imelda (2019). Harvey was just a whole another level of a storm. Ike was pretty bad -- the eye went right over our house and we had significant damage -- but we were able to evacuate. We were worried about our property, of course, but I wasn't in fear of losing my life. Few evacuated for Harvey because it was forecast to be a rain event, not a wind/storm surge event. I don't think anyone really understood what 30" of rain in eight hours would manifest as.

MichaelRapp said:

... I don't think anyone really understood what 30" of rain in eight hours would manifest as.

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30" is hard to fathom. Here we get 11" of precip a year and I'm fine with that. Rapid City was 15" but that was poured down a funnel.

Heaviest snow of all winter this morning, but it's all melting as it hits the street.

I don’t remember the rains, looking it up it was more than 2” per hour in some locals.
1965 Arkansas River basin flooding in Colorado.
I do remember my grandfather and I walking down to the river and watching debris and homes float down the river.
We get some pretty heavy rains from time e to time, but nothing like 30 inches!

Does an avalanche count? I was skiing a black run a couple of decades back and the snow below me broke away. It dumped me head-first downhill onto boilerplate ice. Managed to jag the stock tip into the ice and get my skis downhill again, get an edge and back onto my feet, before hitting some impending trees of doom. That is the closest I have come to being dead while skiing.

I was out on a service call for a tractor dealership during the 1990 Plainfield, IL F5 tornado. The skies started looking dark, and heavy rain was coming down. I pulled into a previous employer's business south of DeKalb, IL and stayed in their building as a massive cloud formation/storm front rolled overhead. That formation turned into the F5 tornado that devastated Plainfield. A few years later at a new job, one of the salesmen lived in Plainfield during the tornado. Wiped his house clean out. He had a cast iron pot that took four people to help him put it in the basement. The tornado sucked it out of the basement and was never seen again. A half empty box of laundry soap was still sitting on the shelf where the washing machine used to be... Weird stuff...

Hurricane Charlie. I have lived in Florida for fifty years and only once have been really frightened during a hurricane. For about 20 minutes the storm was incredibly intense when it hit our home in Central Florida.

I saw the sliding glass doors leading to our covered porch bow in a few inches due to the wind.

Charlie was barely a Category 2 storm when it hit us. I don't want to experience anything stronger.

Worst weather, not really scared as amazed at the power of the ocean and the ability of a ship to take the brunt of it. 1983-ish crossing the Atlantic 300ft Navy tin can taking waves up to the mast, 45' rolls thinking it's going to flip, smashing into 40ft swells head on, the ship shakes like it literally hit a wall at 40mph. Walking down a passageway staggering into both bulkheads.Tucking the sheets in both sides of the bunk so you don't get thrown out. And not for just a few hours, DAYS.

Had a tornado here last night, came right beside our house. Lots of damage in town. This was two blocks from us. Radio guys call this Frequency Shift Keying.

jadebox said:

Hurricane Charlie. I have lived in Florida for fifty years and only once have been really frightened during a hurricane. For about 20 minutes the storm was incredibly intense when it hit our home in Central Florida.

I saw the sliding glass doors leading to our covered porch bow in a few inches due to the wind.

Charlie was barely a Category 2 storm when it hit us. I don't want to experience anything stronger.

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Absolutely. I wasn't home for Ike, but when I got back we had significant roof damage and our entire fence was gone. Not toppled over, not in pieces, it was simply just gone.

US41 and the Seney Stretch across the UP at night in a blizzard so bad that 18-wheelers were in the ditch left and right.

Found out the next day that the highway was closed, but we must have missed the barricades in the snow. Holed up in Sault Ste Marie at the friend of the drivers and had to dig out from more than 4’ in the morning.

Ah, college days.

Baltimore area, 1972. Hurricane Agnes. Three feet of water in our basement. Homes in a flood zone completely underwater. Trees uprooted, cars floated away. I was just shy of six.