Dorian Traumatizes Bahamas By Sitting There For Nearly Two Days

Astronaut Nick Hague took this photo of the eye of Hurricane Dorian
on Monday.

Hurricanes stall out and become stationary sometimes.

But I'm not aware of anything like Dorian, which has sat near one island in the Bahamas for something like 30 hours, all the while subjecting the people there to an incredible storm surge and devastating winds.

I really worry about the psychology of the survivors. Anytime someone experiences a category 4 or 5 hurricane, it's traumatic. But the worst of the storm is usually over within several hours and people an then go about the business of picking up the pieces. 

That's terrible, but not as bad as the Bahamas.

Storm surges, sometimes in excess of 20 feet, lingered all day. So did winds exceeding 100 mph. Videos emerged of people trapped in attics. Of storm surges coming into the second floor of a home. Of an airport that looked like a view of the open sea, hundreds of miles from shore.

At last report there were five confirmed deaths in the Bahamas, but I'm sure that toll will rise dramatically as people will finally be able to get in and assess things once Dorian finally starts moving away later today.

More videos at the bottom of this post.

I have to say the National Hurricane Center has been an amazingly steady hand in the extremely difficult, high-stakes forecasting for Hurricane Dorian. 

Had Dorian been way out over the Atlantic Ocean, 1,000 miles from land, it wouldn't make that much of a difference how long it stalled, or when it decided to turn north.

This situation is much more scary.  When it turns north will determine whether Florida gets a terrible disaster or just a glancing blow. Forecasts from the National Hurricane Center are critical for emergency managers to determine who evacuates and who doesn't.

Too few evacuations could mean deaths. Too many are an expensive inconvenience. So far, the NWS forecasts have been spot on.  Donald Trump's criticism notwithstanding.

Trump caused some confusion when he said Alabama was being targeted. That was an error, because when he said that, Alabama was under no threat and the National Weather Service in Birmingham felt compelled to put out a statement telling Alabamans to chill and not worry about Dorian.

Of course, media reports of this hiccup were blasted as fake news by Trump, and his supporters blasted the National Weather Service for, um, being accurate.

But all this is a sideshow. I'll go with what the scientists say

The meteorologists (scientists) at National Hurricane Center continues to believe Dorian will start a northwestward, then northerly course later today. They're still not expecting it to come ashore in Florida, but that doesn't mean the Sunshine State will avoid bad weather. Not at all.

But at least there's a good chance that the strongest hurricane force winds will remain offshore. Still, there will be gusty winds, damaging waves and storm surges and the risk of heavy rain.

Plus, we still don't know exactly how close Dorian will get to Georgia and the Carolinas and strong the storm will be at that point.

It does look like Dorian will miss New England, except maybe clip Cape Cod and the islands with rough seas and gusty winds.

An overview from the Washington Post:



Storm surge inside a house:

Harrowing Hurricane Michael 911 Calls Tell Us Why To Evacuate In Hurricanes

LeClaire Bryan, in red shirt, mother of country singer Luke Bryan, is
overwhelmed after seeing her home, wrecked by Hurricane Michael
last October. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

The Atlantic hurricane season got off to its official start on Saturday, June 1. Already, we've had brief Subtropical Storm Andrea, and there is some sort of tropical system trying to bubble up off the southern Mexican coast.

Despite all the predictions, we can't tell for sure how this hurricane season will play out. After the 2017 and 2018 seasons, we can only hope this year is a dud. That's only hope, though.

To give you a preview of how harrowing these hurricanes are, the Tampa Bay Times put out an article and released audio of 911 calls at the height of Hurricane Michael last October in the Florida panhandle.  

They're hard to read and even harder to listen to. But you ought to, as they give you a very good motivation to do what meteorologists and emergency managers tell you to do in a weather emergency, be it a hurricane, tornado, flood, winter storm, or whatever other bad stuff comes our way.

You can listen to some parts of the calls in the videos at the bottom of this post, but even the text is scary. People were calling 911, but no paramedics, no ambulance, no firefighters, no police could come to the rescue. The winds were too relentless, too powerful, too dangerous.

Says the Tampa Bay Times:

"A man stuck in a collapsing trailer begged for help. 'Please come get me, ma'am.'  The dispatcher broke down, sobbing. A colleague took over for her. 'Sweetie, I would come and get you right now if I could, I swear. I need you to just stay with me.'"

The man later cries out, "Oh my God, help me please!"  The dispatchers could do nothing but urge him to find a (probably nonexistent) interior room in the trailer.

Another 911 caller said, "There's 10 of us in here and the roof's gone."  The dispatcher could only tell the to move into an interior space near a load bearing wall. The dispatcher said the calm eye of the storm would move over the caller's location in minutes, but the 10 people had to stay put anyway. There was no time to flee to another shelter before the winds came roaring back.

Another caller was outside, in the terrible storm, on the phone tellling dispatchers a man - his neighbor - had collapsed. He didn't think he was breathing.  Didn't know if the man's heart was still beating. Dispatchers tried to coach the caller with CPR and mouth to mouth resuscitation.  The caller tried.

We later learn the man who collapsed didn't make it.  The 911 caller who tried to help the dying man survived.

It's unclear what happened to the man in the collapsed trailer, or the ten people in the roofless house.

All this is to say: Even if the storm doesn't look bad on paper, that you think you'll be fine, do what the weather people and the emergency workers tell you. If they told you to leave, do it.   If they tell you to hunker down, do it. If they tell you to hide in the basement, do it. If they tell you the roads are too dangerous to drive on, stay home.

The hardest part of all this to take is reading the comments section of the Tampa Bay Times article. As many commenters pointed out, lots of people don't have the money or the means to evacuate. So they hunker down and pray for the best. I wish we were better at making all socio-economic classes safe in emergencies.

Here are some of the audio tapes. They should all scare you straight. Remember them the  next time you face a weather emergency, be it a hurricane or anything else.

The first one is the man in the collapsing trailer, and the sobbing dispatcher and the rising panic in the man's voice, as the trailer blows away and he's out in the storm. I wish I knew what happened to him. Listen:



This next one is the 10 people in the roofless house. The caller asks if they can make a run for it when the eye comes. Should they try piling into a four-wheel drive vehicle and go somewhere?   The dispatcher adamantly (and correctly) urges them to stay put in an interior room, even though the roof is goine. Load bearing walls would help. Still sounds awfully scary, though:



Finally, this one is the caller trying to help the dying man with coaching from 911 dispatchers:

Very Scary Paradise, California Bodycam Video Emerges. How Did They Survive?

Image from a terrifying body cam video of people
trying to escape the Paradise, California wildfire earlier this month. 

I was terrified just watching the video at the bottom of this post and you will be, too.

The video is body cam footage from Butte County Sheriff's Deputy Aaron Parmlet as he searched for four nurses he needed to help evacuate from Feather River Hospital as this month's deadly wildfire overtook Paradise, California.

The wildfire is now the deadliest in the United States in decades, claiming at least 88 lives.

There's still trouble going on around Paradise. Heavy rains yesterday led to flash floods, debris flows and new evacuations.

In the video, Parmlet thought he was going to be one of those victims, so he turned on the body cam to record what he believed might be his last moments. 

The fire killed his patrol car and he was forced to go on foot. He and other evacuees can barely be seen in the thick smoke. Fire burned everywhere and great gusts of embers engulfed people. With the choking smoke and heat, I don't know how any of the people in the video lived.

Happy spoiler alert: They did survive. Eventually a tractor emerged from the smoke. Parmlet got the attention of the driver with his flashlight and they used the tractor to get out of what was certainly hell on Earth.

Here's the video:

Another Cataclysmic Wildfire In California: Signs Of Climate Change

A home burns in Paradise, California as an intense wildfire
swept through. Photo by Noah Berger/AP

Another autumn, another terrible, unprecedented wildfire.

As you might have seen on the news, an explosive wildfire charged through parts of northern California yesterday and last night.
While there are often wildfires out west, this one was yet another example of fire behavior people haven't seen before. At least until recent years.

This blaze, called the Camp Fire, went from basically nothing to scorching 31 square miles within 12 hours. Like some extreme fires before it, like those in Redding and Santa Rosa, California last year, this one moved so fast people couldn't get out of the way.

Although there have been no confirmed fatalities yet in and around the city of Paradise, though the San Franciso Chronicle says it has reports of some deaths. Searchers haven't been able to get into the fire zone to have a look. It's too chaotic.

That's putting it mildly. Here's a glimpse of this awfulness via the Weather Channel:

"Officials confirmed to the AP that some residents who attempted to escape the fire in their vehicles were then forced to flee on foot - some holding pets and even babies in their grasp -as the flames drew closer. With few options out of Paradise, roads quickly became gridlocked, and abandoned cars left in the middle of the road only made the problems worse."

In desperation, bulldozers pushed those cars off the road so emergency responders could go in and try to rescue people. The roof of the emergency room at the local hospital caught fire. People were forced to drive through flames to get out. Other people only had a couple minutes' warning to get out of their homes as flames roared in.

Who knows how many people got out?  These paragraphs from the San Francisco Chronicle sounds grim:

"Family members and friends searched for scores of missing people. They inundated 911 with hundreds of requests for help tracking down people who were feared trapped behind fire lines. They flooded Twitter too, posting names and photos of loved ones, along with the addresses where they'd last been seen."

"Hundreds of people were unaccounted for Thursday evening after the mad rush to evacuate. Especially worrisome were reports of older people - including some with dementia or mobility problems - who had not checked in with friends or relatives."

To give you an idea about how fast this fire is, CalFire says in modern California history only nine fires destroyed more than 1,000 structures. This one looks like it destroyed that many homes and businesses within just 12 hours.

A church burns in Paradise, California Thursday.
Photo by Scott Strazzante/SF Chronicle

Southern California is under the gun, too. Fires in Ventura County kept getting worse overnight, and thousands evacuated from there as well. It appears from news video that many houses are on fire.

One of those fires is burning around the community of Thousand Oaks, forcing evacuations there. This comes just one day after a mass shooting at a bar in Thousand Oaks that claimed 12 lives. Just terrible.

Of course you can't fully blame climate change on each individual fire. But recent fires have all the hallmarks of being influenced by climate change. Including this one in northern California.

The wildfire's behavior - incredibly fast moving under intense winds -  is becoming increasingly commonplace. It used to be rare to have these chaotic evacuations with people trapped. And this fire and others are happening at a time of year that would have been virtually impossible in decades past.

Northern California should have had its first batches of autumn rains by now. It should have been too wet for this fire to get going so intensely across a parched forest and landscape. (The ongoing fires in southern California make a little more sense because winter rains normally wouldn't have really reached the south yet.)

There've been other fires that have been equally bizarre. In July, 2017, the now-famous fire tornado or fire whirl, a massive rotating firestorm with winds of up to 165 mph, crashed through neighborhoods around Redding, California.

Last October, the Tubbs fire in the Napa Valley area of California became the most destructive in California history, killing 22 people and causing $15 billion in damage.

Destructive wildfires have been popping up in weird places in recent years, too. A fire in what is normally fairly damp forests killed 14 people in and around Gatlinburg, Tennessee in late November, 2016. Again, that's a weird time of year for a wildfire in that part of the country.

Another extreme wildfire in May, 2016 destroyed parts of Fort McMurray, Canada, at a time of year when things should have been wet from melting spring snow.

Skeptics will say there have always been extreme wildfires. That's true. The deadly Peshtigo, Wisconsin wildfire of 1871 that killed as many as 2,000 people comes to mind.

But the increased frequency of these incredible, super-wildfires of recent years should give anyone concerned about climate change pause. Other things besides climate change are making these fires worse. The biggest problem is people keep building houses in or on the edges of forests that are prone to fire.

Climate change, though, is certainly a factor. Which means we'll see more and more wildfire tragedies like we're seeing in California today.

Here'a a harrowing video of somebody driving through the flames to get out of the wildfire. A fiery tree even lands on the car!



Here's news video from Paradise, California that shows everything, including an elementary school, in flames:

School Bus Drivers Keep Driving Into Dangerous Floods

Dash cam image from inside a bus that was driven into Texas floodwaters.
The driver and the student riding the bus were saved, but the bus driver
was fired and faces criminal charges.

Heavy rain is likely over many parts of the eastern third of the United States and in the Pacific Northwest over the next week or so.

Some areas could experience flooding. 

Which got me thinking about school buses. The Mike Smith Enterprises Blog had a very worthy read recently about the shocking number of school bus drivers who drive into flood waters. Even when there's signs that say "High Water" or "Road Closed."

Smith documented at least eight instances so far this school year. In each case, he reports, children were on the buses and they had to be rescued. There've been no serious injuries so far, but these are close calls, and the potential for fatalities in these situations is high.

This is an international problem. Just this past week there was a tragedy in Jordan, when a flood swept away a school bus, killing 18 people, mostly children. 

By the way, check out the scary video at the bottom of this post that shows one recent incident in Texas.

It doesn't take much water to push a vehicle downstream, even if said vehicle is a big yellow school bus.

Why are bus drivers taking such risks with children? Smith has a theory:

"There is the possibility bus drivers are put under sufficient pressure to make schedules that it causes them to toss good judgement aside and attempt to make it through flooding in spite of the fact that drivers involved in many of these instances are fired."

School districts nationwide should read Smith's blog post and make sure strict rules are in place concerning buses and flooded roads.

As far as I'm concerned the rule should be: If the road is flooded, the bus doesn't go through. If this messes up schedules, makes kids late or is otherwise disruptive, too bad. Deal with it.

Other media is picking up on this phenomenon, so I hope this issue gets drummed into school bus service operators' heads.

Below is a scary video of the most recent case: A school bus with one kid on board drove into floodwater and was swept away. The driver, Nathan DeYoung, 57, was fired and police charged him with child endangerment and driving through a barricade.  A dash cam video in the bus captured the whole thing.

Notice in the video the barricades are well marked, but he drove through anyway. When he encountered the creek, you can see it was rushing fast, but he drove in anyway. The bus was carried quite a way downstream. Somehow, the bus didn't overturn. The driver and kid on board likely would have drowned it that happened.

The middle school student onboard the bus called his mother in hysterics when he was on the flooded bus because he thought he was going to die. No child should go through that. Excellent work by local first responders got the kid and the driver out quickly.

Watch:

"Fire Tornado" In Redding California Was Even Scarier, More Incredible Than First Thought

The Reddiing, California "firenado" didn't burn these houses but
its powerful winds still did a lot of damage.

A week or so ago, I described what was pretty much a massive "fire tornado" during what is called the Carr Wildfire in Redding, California. The "tornado" was so massive and powerful that it badly damaged buildings that didn't even burn

I described it - accurately - as extremely scary, but more details have emerged about this thing that make it even more terrifying.

According to the Los Angeles Times, here's what Redding Police Chief Roger Moore saw:

"Trees appeared to be levitating, and branches and sheet metal roofs seemed to orbit the column, Moore said. Uprooted objects launched into the air ignited mid-flight. Vegetation and homes hundreds of feet from the column also caught fire before the twister arrived, he said. It was as loud as a roaring jet engine."

The Los Angeles Times described some of the damage the tornado or fire whirl or whatever it was did:

"A soaring transmission tower was tipped over. Tiles were torn off roofs of homes. Massive trees were uprooted. Vehicles were moved. In one spot, a fence post was bent around a tree with the bark on one side sheared off."

That type of damage, according to a National Weather Service analysis of this incredible event, is the equivalent of an EF-3 tornado on the Enhanced Fujita scale, which is a ranking of tornado strengths.

The National Weather Service said the winds in this whirl were as high as 143 mph. Even if it was not a true tornado, this kinda, sorta tornado was the strongest twister in California history.

Most tornadoes are weaker than EF-3's and tornadoes of this strength are terrifying and deadly. However, in a regular, non-wildfire related EF-3 tornado, say in Oklahoma, your chances of survival are good if you are in a storm shelter of the basement of a well-constructed home.

But this was a fire whirl, and taking shelter in a basement wouldn't help. You'd burn to death. It's amazing that this fire tornado tore through a heavily populated area and only six people died in the wildfire. Six people is six too many, but still, this could have killed dozens

Wildfires in California and other areas have gotten, well, wilder in recent years. Heat and drought, at least partly associated with climate change, is causing this dangerous turn in wildfire behavior.

Fire whirls are usually much smaller than the one in Redding, California, but they are always dangerous. They help make the wildfires as a whole more dangerous because they make winds stronger and much more erratic. Plus they fling embers far and wide, starting new fires.

This might be another one of those "new normal" things, unfortunately.

Here's a video taken by Justin Sanchez as he fled the Redding "firenado"  and just barely got out in time. You can probably understand why he sounds so terrified:

Incredible February Heat Records In Vermont, Northeast And Arctic Beyond Unprecedented

This was a snow covered scene in my St Albans Vermont
yard two days ago. Today, amid record heat, I felt like I
should have been planting flowers. 

This is just a quick Wednesday evening update, as I will have more to say about this tomorrow, but some temperatures were recorded today in Vermont and elsewhere are just beyond belief.

A bit of history: Last February, Burlington and Bennington, Vermont reached 72 degrees, breaking by a large margin the record for the hottest temperature ever recorded in the Green Mountain State during the second month of the year.

At the time this happened, I remember saying that even in the worst case scenario for global warming or whatever is going on, chances are we wouldn't see something like that in our lifetimes.

Boy was I wrong!!! Bennington, Vermont reached an amazing 77 degrees today, five degrees above last year's record and so warm it's scary.  I mean, really scary. That's a typical summertime high temperature. In February!

A cold front arrived in Burlington today before maximum temperatures could reach their highest potential. Still, it got up to 69 degrees in Burlington. Had last year not set the February record, Burlington would have exceeded the previous record high for February, which until 2017 had been 62 degrees.

Also today, Montpelier reached 70 degrees, by far their hottest February reading on record. Elsewhere, New York City's Central Park got up to 78 degrees, its hottest February temperature on record.

While all this was going on, extreme weather was causing all kinds of issues elsewhere in the nation. Record lows are being reported in the northwestern third of the United States, but those lows, while very unusual, can't compete with the bizarre warmth it the Northeast.

An airmass with a record high amount of moisture for this time of year today unleashed flooding downpours in Louisiana and Arkansas. These are states that have had an increasing frequency of flooding in recent years and decades.

Also today, freezing rain was falling from Minnesota to Texas.

And up in the Arctic, temperatures are expected to rise above freezing around the North Pole by Sunday. That's something that used to never happen this time of year.

Arctic sea ice is actually decreasing in extent this week. The Arctic ice is already at a record low extent for this time of year. The ice should still be expanding this time of year. It's only February.

According to the Washington Post, temperatures in the Arctic are now as much as 45 degrees above normal. The northernmost weather station in Greenland was above freezing this week for a full 24 hours. This in a place where the sun set in October and won't rise above the horizon again until March. Yet, they've had a thaw.

I'm not a scientist, but these developments are all very unnerving.

I  MUST give you the caveat that an individual weather event isn't proof of global warming. But the extremes today are consistent with global warming. Also, in terms of extremes, today's weather is also beyond the worst fear of many climate scientists.

I'm sure things will settle down once the current wild weather pattern settles down, but today's weather news frightened me more than almost anything I've seen in my more than five decades on this Earth.

Two More Videos Showing How Terrifying This Week's California Mudslides Were

A firefighter on the roof f a house engulfed in mud
and rocks and the mudslides and debris flows in
southern California this week. Photo by
Marcio Jose San Sanchez/AP

There's a lot of videos out there of the terrible mudslides and debris flows in California earlier this week, and more keep popping up.

At last report, 17 people had died in the mudslides and eight others were still missing. While the rain has stopped and is not expected to start again for more than a week, the damage is clearly done.

It'll take a long time to recover from the worst of the mess in California.

Here's one video of a mud and rockslide shoving a car own a road in Burbank, California. The occupants of the car are reported to have escaped without injury. Video via the Weather Network:



Next video is the increasing terror as the mudslides engulfs Montecito, California in the pre-dawn hours Monday. At first, the person taking the video is outdoors, warning a van driver to get out now because the debris flow is coming.

Then, he goes inside, while the house rapidly fills up with mud:

Portugal Fire Videos Show How Scary They Were

Wildfires menacing Braga, Portugal this week

The death toll from the wildfires in Portugal and Spain over the past couple of days has reached 36.

Between this fire and the ones in Portugal back in June, 99 people have died in wildfires in that country this year. Previously, the most fatalities from fire in a single year in Portugal was 25.  

It's been a bad year for wildfires in many parts of the world. Just ask people in northern California, where the death toll from fires this month is now at 41 and could still rise. And western Canada spent most of the summer on fire.

Here's the fire advancing on a bunch of people along a road in Portugal. I don't know how the guy with the big branch in his hand thought he was going to beat back the flames with it, but hope springs eternal, I guess:



Chaos and panic brought on by the fires in Galacia, Spain:



An amazing fire tornado in Portugal during the height of the fires. For scale, look for the person and the car to the left of the fire twister:

Dash Cammer Captures Dangerous Vietnam Tornado

Screen grab of tornado blowing away buildings
in a July 28 tornado.  

In the video in this post, a person with a dash cam captures a tornado in Vietnam that is truly scary.

It doesn't look like the tornado is particularly strong, as tornados go, but the building construction is flimsy.

Which means sharp sheet metal and other scary debris slices through traffic, and most ominiously, motorcyclists desperately trying to escape the twister.

Miraculously, nobody was seriously hurt, says several reports.

If I had to guess, I'd say the tornado was an EF1 on a scale of zero to five, with five being the strongest. An EF1 tornado has winds of 73 to 112 mph. 

EF1 tornadoes typically don't flatten well constructed structures, but the buildings its hitting in this video don't look solidly built.

Here's the frightening video: 

Very Scary Flash Flood In Ellicott City, Maryland Last Night

Devastating flash flood in Ellicott City, Maryland last night

A flash flood sent a wall of water through downtown Ellicott City, Maryland, last night

The flood killed at least two people and sent dozens of cars floating away. Gushes of water roared through shops and apartment, destroying them.

The floods hit as restaurants and nightspots were filled with people out on a Saturday evening in the historic city, so a lot of people were trapped in cars and buildings.

As in most flash floods, the water arrived instantly, and later at night, it just as instantly retreated, leaving people wandering around the devastated downtown until officials evacuated the area.

In the video below, taken from inside an Ellicott City restaurant, the view out the window escalates as water rises. By the middle of the video, horrified people in the restaurant watch cars sweep away in the torrent, some with people desperately clinging to them.



Here's another view of the flood:

 

Here's a dramatic rescue of a woman from a car in the raging torrent.



Here's the aftermath, and you can see the damage to ground floor shops and restaurants and art galleries is massive:

 

Watch These Wild Lightning Strikes

There were quite a few big thunderstorms around eastern half of the United States over the past couple days.

Here's one taken by a dash camner of a utility pole being blown apart by a lightning strike in Chicago. Stick around in this video for the slow mo version in the last half:



Another lightning strike during the same Chicago storm set off a wild electrical chain reaction at a subway station that ultimately partly collapsed it. Watch the video of that big moment:



Monday, in New York City, the Empire State Building got hit. Interesting that it hit the side, not the top of the skyscraper. I bet the people in the office where lightning struck just outside got a startle:

Terrible Chinese Tornado Kills Nearly 100 People

A victim of the massive Chinese tornado this week. 

A vicious tornado struck near the city of Yancheng, and its wide destructive path through heavily populated villages and towns took nearly 100 lives and injured close to 800 people, the BBC said.

Chinese state media said it was the worst tornado to strike the nation in at least half a century.

Meanwhile, that well-advertised outbreak of severe weather in the United States Wednesday and Thursday did indeed happen, but it really could have been worse.

More details on that toward the bottom of this post, but first, China's tornado disaster, which really was as bad as it can get, pretty much.

CHINA

Rescue efforts at the scene of the Chinese tornado were being messed up by heavy rain and the risk of more hailstorms and tornadoes in the area.

Photos and video showed widespread destruction, with man buildings leveled or destroyed, cars tossed around and utilities in ruins.

Based on the photos, I'd guess the tornado was an EF4, the second strongest on the Enhanced Fujita scale, a widely used ranking system that judges the strength of tornadoes.

An EF4 woul have winds of between 166 and 200 mph.

The huge Chinese tornado was obviously just as terrifying as the big ones that sometimes strike the middle and southern parts of the United States in the spring and early summer.

"It was like the end of the world......I heard the gales and ran upstairs to shut the windows. I had hardly reached the top of the stairs when I heard a boom and saw the entire wall with windows on it torn away," local resident Xie Litian told the Chinese state news agency, according to the BBC. 

Yancheng and the surrounding province of Jiangsu is on the central coast of China, well southeast of Beijing.  

More destruction from the tornado in China this week.  

The Chinese tornado proves once again that the United States isn't the only place to get big tornadoes.

This time of year, the Jiangus region in China is especially prone to dangerous storms, notes Bob Henson in a Weather Underground blog post. 

A weather front often sets up and stalls over eastern China as the southwest monsoon begins to push northward in the spring and summer.

Intense thunderstorm complexes very frequently form along this front, causing severe floods, severe thunderstorms, and sometimes, tornadoes.

Storm activity is often worse in a year following an El Nino, which is the case now, Henson notes.

UNITED STATES

As expected, a big complex of severe storms got going in Illinois Wednesday and raced southeastward all the way to North Carolina by Thursday morning.

According to NOAA's Storm Prediction Center, there were 22 reports of tornadoes, almost all of them in Illinois, with a swath of scattered wind damage through Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina.

Luckily, the tornadoes hit in mostly rural areas, so damage and injuries weren't as bad as they could have been had they hit more populated areas. The Chicago Tribune reported four injuries from the tornadoes in Illinois, but thankfully no deaths.

Severe weather is possible across mostly the northern tier of the United States over the next few days, but no blockbuster outbreaks of dangerous weather are expected.

Updates And More Scary Fort McMurray Fire Videos

The fire menacing a Fort McMurray neighborhood
Photo by Mary Sexsmith  

It had to be terrifying. The flames descended on Fort McMurray, Canada so fast that nobody had time to grab anything.

Just get in the car and flee as fast as you can. But you couldn't go fast because of the traffic congestion caused by everybody else fleeing.

It's amazing that I have only heard of two deaths with this thing so far. Both apparently were in car crashes during the evacuation and not the fire itself.

Reuters reports at least 1,600 structures, including hundreds of homes, have been destroyed so far.

There is no telling when all these evacuees will be able to return to Fort McMurray. Some had to evacuate evacuation centers because of the spreading fire.

Smoke from the fire has spread southward all the way to the U.S. Gulf of Mexico coastline, That's a distance of at least 2,500 miles, which tells you massive and powerful this blaze is.

On top of the human suffering - which of course is by far the most important -- the fires have disrupted production in the oil sands area around Fort McMurray.

So this affects you. Oil on the world markets is trading at a 3 percent higher because of tighter supplies brought on by the Alberta fire, CBC reports.

Below is a compilation of some of the wilder videos.

Here's one view of the harrowing escape. You can tell how frightened the people in the car are amid the flames. I'd be scared out of my mind, too:



Here's the traffic congestion. No surprise when the guy on the motorcycle finally freaks out:



This guy is so understandably frightened he can't start his car as spot fires break out on front lawns and a wall of flames approaches from the forest. He says it's probably the last time he'll see his house.

Sadly, he was probably right.



In this rear dash cam, I thought he was driving at night the smoke was so thick. I realized it was daylight when he emerged from the worst of it:

Uruguay Tornado Hits Store; Watch This Incredible Surveillance Video

Shoppers and employees of a Dolores Uruguay
shoe store look out at windows at an approaching large
tornadoe. Seconds later, they fled to a back room
as wind and debris swept through the store.v

Last week, a terrible tornado struck Uruguay, killing four people and trashing much of the city of Dolores.

I'm always particularly fascinated by surveillance videos of these things, and one of them, taken in a Dolores shoe store on a busy street corner, is one of the most riveting.

In it, you first see store employees and shoppers looking out the window in fascination and worry as they apparently see the tornado approaching.

As the wind picks up, one by one, they flee the large glass windows in front of the store, probably for a more sheltered back room.

These people apparently with the well-placed notion the windows are about to shatter.

As things start to get really bad, you see a car turn the street corner outside. I imagine whoever was in that car was terrified.

Then we see lots of debris blowing past outside, and also blowing into the store as windows and fixtures cave in.

Here's the video:

Softball Sized Hail And Storms Cause Incredibe Damage And Scary Scenes In Texas.

A man holds a gigantic hailstone
that fell on Wylie, Texas Monday.
Photo via Twitter, @heelsandracing. 

An incredible hailstorm hit parts of Texas Monday, dumping softball sized hail on several populated areas.

A few Texas neighborhoods got pummeled by hail the size of grapefruits, which is beyond the pale.

As you can imagine, there was a LOT of damage and some injuries.  Watch the very dramatic, terrifying videos of the storm at the bottom of this post.

The hail was so big that it nearly destroyed some houses. Not only did many windows break, but the hail was big and powerful enough to crash through home roofs.

Once the roofs were breached, the heavy rain accompanying the hail soaked the interior of many homes, television station KDFW reports. 

The hardest hit community was the city of Wylie, Texas, population about 44,000 where  most homes and buildings were damaged by hail.

The city's public works center and schools are closed today due to hail damage, says KDFW.

Emergency rooms in the area were busy with people who'd been cut by flying glass as hail crashed through home windows, or who were caught in cars that were pummeled.

Windows were blown out of these homes in Wylie, Texas
from softball sized hail. Click on the image to
make it bigger and easier to see.  

Damage will be as expensive as a big tornado for sure.

While few if any homes were completely destroyed as in a large twister, the large, damaging hail hit a much larger area than a tornado would.

Since these are busy, populated Dallas suburbs, many thousands of homes, businesses and cars will need expensive, extensive repairs.

This is the third, and the worst destructive hail storm to hit North Texas in the past month. Two March hail storms caused $1 billion, with a "B" dollars in damage.

Click on this link to see hail smashing through glass in this home. Unbelievable!

Here's some more videos out of the Wylie, Texas area Monday:



More from Wylie, Texas:




Coming through the windows in Wylie, Texas:

Watch Extremely Narrow Escape From Oklahoma Wildfire

A road grader operator flees as an Oklahoma
wildfire engulfs him Tuesday. He was rescued by
television station storm chasers.  

The Plains States have been getting hammered by repeated, large wildfires this spring.

They've had repeated bouts of hot, bone dry, very windy weather. The resulting fires have damaged or destroyed many homes and scorched hundreds of square miles. 

More wildfires broke out in Oklahoma yesterday. One burned through 28,000 acres in northwestern Oklahoma Tuesday.

Television station KWTV has video of storm chasers Val and Amy Castor, who were out documenting the wildfires when they encountered a road grade operator who was stuck as large flames approached him -- and quickly!

Val Castor, a veteran of many, many tornado chases and wildfire chases, said he'd never seen a wildfire move that fast.

Miraculously, after the fire passed by and firefighters doused it, the road grader was still operational.

Still, the guy in the road grader would have been burned to death had he not gotten out with the help of the Castors, as you see in the video below:

One Of The Most Incredible Tornado Videos You'll See Ended In Tragedy

A still from a video taken by Clem Schultz last year
of a tornado approaching his house. It would
kill his wife, injury him and destroy his home. 

About a year ago, on April 9 2015,  a terrible tornado swept across northern Illinois.

It killed two people, injured a couple dozen and packed winds of up to 200 mph

A man  named Clem Schultz, 85, of Fairdale, Illinois knew the tornado was approaching. But he was convinced the tornado would sweep by just to the south or west of his house.

As the tornado approached, he was upstairs in the house retrieving camping lanterns because he and his wife Geri figured the storm would still cut off electricity to the house, says the Chicago Daily Herald. 

While he was upstairs, Clem spotted the tornado to the west. He started taking a video of it on his cell phone. You'll see the video at the bottom of this post and it is incredible. And scary.

Early in the video, you get the sense that Clem was right. The tornado seemed ready to pass just to the south of his location.

But it turned, and you see the tornado approaching Clem, then engulfing the neighborhood, then him and the house. The house blew apart, and Clem rode a collapsing chimney down to the ground.

A few minutes after the tornado passed, neighbors dug Clem out of the rubble. Geri had been in the kitchen. She died in the tornado.

After the tornado, Clem moved to a farmhouse in another town. He watches TV, sees something that needs commenting on, and is ready to tell Geri, but she's not there.

His dog Missy survived the tornado, so they watch TV together. Clem was able to retrieve a aftgan Geri had made. It was the last Geri crocheted before the tornado, the Daily Herald reports. 

Clem said at first he didn't have the will to watch the video he recorded, but finally did. He then shared it with a meteorology student that had been chasing the storm.

Says the Daily Herald:

"That student included it in his doctorate studies about the internal structure of tornadoes. The rare look from inside has been shared worldwide, and it is due to be shown soon at an international atmospheric science convention in California.

"I'm proud of it," Schultz says. "My video is saving lives."

I'm glad he's able to see the real silver lining in this tragedy. And I hope this video does lead to better undestanding of tornadoes and how to forecast them and how to get people out of danger.

This is the second tragic time of aware of where a person filmed an approaching tornado that would soon kill their spouse.

In March, 2012, a couple sat in their living room in Henryville, Indiana, filming a tornado as it approached. As it got close, they tried to take shelter in a corner of their house, which lacked a basement.

The Indiana tornado tore the house apart, killing the husband and injuring the wife.

Here's Clem Shutz's video from last year in Fairdale, Illinois. Watch it in full screen to really see what's going on. So frightening:

FedEx Worker Somehow Survives Tornado As Building Blows Apart Around Her

Kyra Johnson at the wreckage of the
Louisiana hardware store where she
tried to seek refuge in a tornado. She
was trapped outside, behind a soda machine,
but wasn't seriously hurt. Hardware store
owner David Sagora gave her the
shirt she is holding. Add caption 

Back on February 23,  when tornadoes were slicing through Louisiana, among other states, FedEx driver Kyra Johnson found herself confronting an EF3 tornado in Paincourtville, Louisiana.

She tried running into a nearby hardware store, but it was closed, it's doors locked. With no time for a Plan B as the tornado approached, she ducked behind a soda machine in front of the store and hoped for the best.

The surveillance video, as you see below, shows the store disintegrating in the tornado.

The video opens with Johnson trying the locked door, the  scrambling behind the vending machine. Clips that follow show other parts of the store getting demolished in the storm.

The videos were all from surveillance cameras around the store.

Remarkably, she only suffered minor injuries, even though the vending machine tipped over and large debris swirled around her.

She's lucky to be alive. Most people caught outdoors in an EF3 tornado with winds of 135 mph usually die because they are struck by debris.

Here's the scary video, but turn down the sound if you don't want the obnoxious music that accompanies it

Scary Video Shows What Happens When California Rain Comes Down Too Hard

The view through a car windshield as a big debris
flow approaches during heavy rain last
week in California. The motorist slammed
it into reverse and got out of there. Good move. 

Last week, southern California got some much needed rain.

As often the case, the rain came down too fast and too hard in some cases, leading to debris flows, mudslides and flash floods.  

The frightening video at the bottom of this post shows how fast a California debris flow can come on when it rains too hard.  Spoiler: The motorist got out of there just fine.

More is coming. Quite a lot of rain is possible in central and northern California over the next week. It won't rain quite so hard in southern California, at least for now.

With the possibility of heavy rain in mind, though, I'm sure people will be bracing for more damage from floods and mudslides.

Here's that video: