Most Memorable Weather Event You've Experienced?

[AppleDumpling]

Hurricane Sandy. Our area was under mandatory evacuation. We returned to flooding and damage to our home, though not as severe as many of our neighbors. No power for over 2 weeks. No heat for about a month (and it was cold!) Schools closed as they were used as shelters. Roads closed, trees down everywhere. It was like a war zone. We were fortunate compared to others who lost their entire homes, and also that we had a safe place (my parents’ house) to stay nearby during the storm and the cleanup afterwards. 7 1/2 years later, there are people in my town still recovering/rebuilding their homes (waiting for insurance money).

 

[AlohaNow]

Hurricane Isabel in 2003 as it roared up the Chesapeake Bay. We lived near Annapolis, MD at the time and I never need to live through a weather event like that again!

 

[RUDisney]

June 1972. I was 6. Hurricane Agnes hit the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania. It didn't hit our house or town, but I remember driving through the flood zone with my parents to witness the devastation. My Dad really wanted to buy a flood car, but Heaven protected him from his wishes.

I remember that blizzard in 1993. I was living with my parents and the plows never came through for days after the snow stopped. After the 3rd day, we finally shoveled from their driveway and house to the corner so we could get out and go back to work. My boss couldn't understand why I couldn't get to work when I lived in Scranton then. Not all of Scranton was plowed at the same rate. I was more understanding, years later, when one of my employees got stuck at his house... in Scranton.

 

[eileenjez]

We moved to Wilmington just in time for Hurricane Florence. Spent way to much getting supplies that we didn't have but needed. Went thru blizzards and minus degree weather in North Dakota along with the spring time tornado. Dodged tornados along Interstate 70 in Colorado and rains that flooded the Rosebud reservations in Wyoming. Although not weather related we have also survived earthquakes in the San Fernando Valley. i think the easiest state we lived in was New Mexico with the monsoon season. No big deal for us there just a lot of lightning and thunder.

 

[tex1989]

I am 60 years old and have lived on the Texas Gulf Coast around Houston my whole life. I guess it all started in 1961/62 with Hurricane Carla. Then Alisha, Allison, Rita, Ike, Harvey, and a bunch of near misses. Tornado's a plenty,. Spent two years working in Calgary, Alberta and 40 below zero is to dang cold for a Texas boy! Not nearly as big a storm but have been offshore in a 30 foot boat in 8-10 foot seas and that's no fun. In the Bay have spent more than one fishing trip dodging water spouts.

So yeah seen an awful lot of weather in my life.

 

[Bamaclan4]

Tornado outbreaks on April 3, 1974 and April 27, 2011. And the Blizzard of 1993. Never no about the weather in the South. A lady from Seattle struck up a conversation on the bus from AOA to Magic Kingdom on our last trip. She started talking about the humidity and weather in the South. Somehow the subject of tornadoes came up. It was really interesting trying to explain what happens to someone that has very little knowledge of tornadoes. She was really very amazed by the whole subject.

 

[MGMmjl]

Tornado outbreaks on April 3, 1974 and April 27, 2011. And the Blizzard of 1993. Never no about the weather in the South. A lady from Seattle struck up a conversation on the bus from AOA to Magic Kingdom on our last trip. She started talking about the humidity and weather in the South. Somehow the subject of tornadoes came up. It was really interesting trying to explain what happens to someone that has very little knowledge of tornadoes. She was really very amazed by the whole subject.

April 27, 2011 is another date etched in my memory. I wasn't directly impacted that day (all of the tornadoes were well north of my location), but an EF-4 tornado missed my parents' house to the south by only about 5 miles. I was talking to my dad as the tornado passed, and he could hear the roar and actually a few pieces of debris fell in their yard. That was such a horrible day for the state of Alabama.

 

[The Mayor]

The Blizzard of 78 in Massachusetts. My house at the time was about 300 yards from a beach and high tide hit our front lawn.

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

There's been multiple ones honestly spanning different seasons.

~several tornado events come to mind. Not any one outbreak in particular. There's been ones touch down a few miles from my house, ones that flung debris with minimal damage 50miles away, been on the ground for eternities, an outbreak that happened on my birthday, one where I was working retail and a few streets away there's the tornado and people were still wanting to shop for shoes, etc.

~October surprise in 1996--was a kid happened on my mom's birthday,The event was related to a lot of tree damage caused by weighted down limbs of snow. Back then it was called an unforecastable event because it was rain forecasted in October (normal) that quickly and suddenly shifted to snow event (not very common in October)-6 1/2 inches of snow. May not sound like a lot of snow but it down a ton of trees that got weighted down lot of power outages.

~Multiple ice storms. Most people around me will tell you generally it's the ice you gotta worry about. Yes having inches and inches of snow is a problem but ice can't be treated the same way as snow can. Ice can also weigh down trees in the same ways wet snow does. One event happened while I was at college during finals week and they almost cancelled finals scheduled that night and I believe the next day; if they had done that you would have had to take them in June

~Last spring was flooding in the extremes

~Extreme droughts though they run on a cycle so not like places like CA for instance with years and years of prolonged droughts

~Riding out Irma at All-Star Sports September 2017

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

For me it was the tornado that hit our town on Saturday. I've lived in the Tornado Alley my entire life but never seen one wreck the heart of our city like this. Demolished our mall, airport, 100s of homes, and somehow went right by our hospital with no damage at all. And in the middle of a virus crisis which adds a new layer of stress. So yeah, this will never be forgotten by thousands of us.

It's one of the most interesting things to me about tornadoes the immense power they have and yet some things don't get touched. Sometimes the tornadoes are so tightly wrapped that their debris and wind powers don't make it far outside of it.

This is a plastic pot used for planting that was found more than 50 miles from where it originated at from a tornado last May:


The nursery where that pot was picked up was destroyed and was located just miles from my in-laws house who only sustained some roof shingle damage. Just streets away from their house entire homes were decimated down to framing or just foundation, some having only portions of the home ripped off. Just looking at the pot and the fact that it was not also decimated is to me.

 

[emer95]

"Snowvember" , November 2014 WNY -- snow that dumped mostly over my town and the next town over. Just a couple miles north had green grass and sunshine. My brother-in-law couldn't understand why my DH had to call out of work. We got about 5 or 6 feet in a fairly brief period of time. The city (as usual) saw very little of anything.

View attachment 485042
(the driveway looking towards road)

View attachment 485044
Digging out the duck coop (no worries, they were inside with heated luxury)

View attachment 485045
Plows were having trouble on the first passes so they had some help from these guys.

That’s exactly what I was going to post about too. It was horrible. My husband was out of town and I was home alone with the kids. The worst moment for me was when we lost power, and the roof was creaking and I was afraid it was going to collapse.

The October surprise storm of 2013 was another terrible one. We went many days without power and we lost a lot of our trees.

 

[Kennywood]

Sept. 5, 1985 - Hurricane Elena hit Pensacola where I was going to college.

Aug. 4, 2008 - An F2 tornado went through our neighborhood and did a lot of damage.

 

[firefly_ris]

That’s exactly what I was going to post about too. It was horrible. My husband was out of town and I was home alone with the kids. The worst moment for me was when we lost power, and the roof was creaking and I was afraid it was going to collapse.

The October surprise storm of 2013 was another terrible one. We went many days without power and we lost a lot of our trees.

October Surprise 2006 was when I moved to Buffalo from MD -- I had just moved here in August and we were living downtown at my BIL's. It was certainly wild -- all the leaves still on the trees and everything falling down from the ice. I remember every block around us lost power except ours!

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

A forty minute hailstone in Ft Collins back in the summer of 79. Baseball size hail bouncing off cars, thru windows and just off the ground was absolutely crazy!

40mins!? Wow that's a long time. I've never experienced one that long!

 

[lucas]

I'm originally from New Orleans now living in South Florida. There have been lots of hurricanes.

I did not live in NOLA for Hurricane Katrina, but it was the worst for all of my family and friends.

(The worst that I personally went thru, in NOLA, was Hurricane Betsy in 1965.)

 

[JimMIA]

Hurricane Andrew, Miami, August 24, 1992.

Living in Miami, we've been through a number of hurricanes, including some strong direct hits -- but I've never seen anything like Andrew. It absolutely obliterated entire sections in the suburbs south of Miami. Some subdivisions were literally just gone.

The hurricane hit on a Monday. We actually were in San Francisco and couldn't get back until Wednesday because the airport was closed. I was with the police department, and our station at the airport was the only phone I could reliably get with the department.

On Friday, I was assigned to take a reconnaissance flight in a helicopter from north to south in preparation for closing a major road and running it one-way south as a means to expedite food and water trucks. The further south we got, the worse it was. In some areas where we knew trailer parks had been, there were only twisted aluminum debris fields stretching a half-mile or more. It was a mess.

I later drove down into the worst-affected areas -- which despite all the hype about the city of Homestead, was actually about 5 miles north of Homestead. We went to a condo complex called Naranja Lakes, where there was nothing standing more than 3 feet high -- no trees, no buildings, everything was sheared off. I saw one car that had been split in half length-ways by a 15 foot section of reinforced concrete tie-beam that had been thrown about 50 yards from a building across the parking lot. We entered homes where there was nothing higher than the kitchen counters -- not one home, most homes.

Homestead AFB was destroyed, and later closed. Years later, it was reopened as an Air Reserve base, but it's a shadow of what it was on August 24, 1992.

I could go on for pages, but there is just no describing the devastation of that hurricane.

 

[jaybirdsmommy]

I don't know how I forgot this when I posted earlier but lightening struck our house in 2010, It was the freakiest storm, came up in what seemed like minutes with no warning and the lightening and sound were horrible. My son had just walked into his room to get a book off of his bed when it hit and completely demolished one corner of his room, his headboard, bent the metal window frame, and sent a piece of framing lumber flying across the room into the opposite wall.

I knew it had hit something, the flash was like those nuclear bomb scenes in the movies - bright white and blinding. It knocked the power out and fried almost every piece of electronics plugged in at the time. My poor kid came flying out of his room absolutely hysterical screaming "my room, my room." I just thought he was being a drama llama until I finally gave in and went to see what he was talking about and saw the mess.

Funny thing was, when the fire department got there they couldn't find anything hot anywhere so we never did figure out exactly where the lightening hit other than 1 single brick missing off the outside of the house where his room was.

We were very lucky, another house in our neighborhood was also hit and burned completely to the ground (no one injured thankfully).

 

[BlueStarryHat]

For the most memorable...and this isn't nearly as bad as some of your stories...it was Hurricane Belle sometime in the 70s when I was a kid. I remember it because we lived in Wildwood at the Jersey shore during the summer, and our little house was only two blocks from the beach. We decided to go to a relative's house on higher ground. The memorable part is we all put garbage bags on, even my huge great-grandmother, and started out walking in the wind and rain to this other house. My great-grandmother, who was a drama queen, started screaming "We're gonna die! We're gonna die!" So my Mom and my aunt shoved her into a telephone booth to get it out of her system. I can still see them standing there in their garbage bags smoking cigarettes and fuming while Grandmom yelled that she was calling a rescue boat. There was no high water at that time, either.

 

[RedAngie]

Blizzards in February 1978, March 1993, and January 1996.

"The Perfect Storm" in October 1991. Superstorm Sandy October 2011.

I still have a T-shirt from the Blizzard of '93 that the OP mentioned. It was a Saturday, and I wasn't scheduled to work but agreed to fill in for someone. The snow started mid-morning then turned nasty about noon. Second and third shift workers called out and I was at work until late Sunday afternoon, about 34 hours. Everyone who worked that day got this T-shirt several weeks later.

 

[Feralpeg]

I lived in the Midwest, so I lived through more blizzards than I can count. I saw a funnel cloud when I was in middle school. An F4 took out a neighborhood near our home in Kansas City on May 4, 2003. Shortly after, we moved to Florida. We've gone through multiple hurricanes since.