Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Severe Storm July 20

For the past three days, a line of strong and severe storms have raced through our area bringing with them very heavy rain, lots of lightning, and strong winds.  Sunday morning's storm brought with it some hail in addition.  We missed out on Monday's storm, but it knocked down a barn 20 miles north of us.  Tuesday's storm is the topic of this post.  The storm hit around 7:30 a.m. and had lots of lightning, and the strongest winds I've seen since my 6 years in Fulton.  Officially at this station, we recorded a NW wind at 48.3 mph.  Now the anemometer is in a somewhat sheltered area given the houses around us, so I would bump that speed up for accuracy.  After the initial storm passed, light rain fell for about 2.5 hours.  Rainfall totaled 1.02" for the morning.

At night, we had another storm roll through, bringing our daily total to 1.32"

Below are pictures of the damage to the neighborhood.  Anything that wasn't secured down was blown out of yards.  Multiple trees, up to 12" in diameter were snapped in half, and those folks with 6' privacy fencing lost sections.  The van across our street was damaged by a flying piece of fence.  The storm was apparently at its worse over southern Fulton (including my neighborhood).  Where I work, on the north side, we didn't have a single twig on the ground.  But as I drove home for lunch, I saw more and more limbs on the side of the road.







One of the damaged fences

2 comments:

SuzieE said...

Hey, thought I would check out the pics. The damage reminds me of the storms that we ( Middle TN ) had in the spring/summer of 2009.

BTW, in 2007 I remember mowing grass 8 times that year when we normally mow 20-25 times a season. One of the higher temps in August that year was 107, and it was a great year for pumpkins.

Josh Herman said...

WxWatcher, I saw similar destruction on the north side of Lake Winnebago last week. A storm rolled through, just missing Oshkosh, dumping 2" diameter hail in some locations near Appleton and Menasha. Many of the people I know in those areas have photos and stories of the hail. I have yet to see a photo though, but once I do I will share it.