I’m not from the Midwest, although I visit quite often. I love the thunderstorms because in Oregon we rarely get them west of the Cascades, and if we do, they only last about a half hour. And they rarely happen.
When I’ve been in thunderstorms in the midwest, they usually blow through in an hour or two, but last night…that was unreal.
Rather than the usual big line of storms, the storms were forming to the west of Illinois, and then were just heading on east right over Champaign. The lightning started around 11, and by midnight, the rain, wind, and lightning started. I stayed up until 1:30 am watching it. It wasn’t the type of lightning I’m used to. It was mostly sheet, with some big bolts thrown in. The thunder was really loud.
Checking the radar before I went to sleep, I figured it would all be over soon. But it wasn’t. It went on and on and on…one after the other just kept slamming through. I couldn’t sleep because the constant lightning and thunder kept waking me up. The lightning was all around and was near constant. When I did fall asleep for short stretches, I had some pretty weird dreams
I got up at 5:30 a.m. and it was still pretty violent. I had a flight to catch that left at 7:00 a.m. and I never thought it would take off. But the storms finally ended, and I was off on my way home.
I can’t imagine I’ll ever see another thunderstorm like that ever again, and although I got very little sleep last night, it was worth it.
I grew up in a 1913 vintage wood-frame farmhouse west of Champaign. When the big thunderstorms rolled through, it was pretty terrifying - the whole house would shake.
A few years ago I happened to be out there when a big nasty blew through. We all hit the basement. When it quieted down, we saw that a huge hackberry (at least 80 feet tall?) had taken out three other trees and the power lines. The root ball was at least fifteen feet in diameter - it rolled out as a perfect hemisphere as the whole tree fell over.
But I have since been a severe weather groupie. When the big shit gets going somewhere in the USA, I am glued to my computer, watching facebook, twitter and live streams from various sources.
Seeing that big SOB hit Tuscaloosa/Birmingham in real time gave me sad eyes.
Sounds like one of the Kentucky thunderstorms I grew up with. One day we had a thunderstorm and an earthquake and I was quite more frightened by the storm.
That’s cool!
My husband is an OTR truck driver. He called me late yesterday afternoon/early evening, telling me that he saw the TIV2 vehicle somewhere in northern Illinois (I wasn’t paying much attention to where, exactly), and it was heading east. Maybe they were heading in that general direction to intercept the storm? Hard telling.
I went to college in Champaign, and whenever I was there in the summer, I would stand in the front doorway of the building where I lived and watch the thunderstorms for hours. As far as something that happens all the time goes, summer thunderstorms are surprisingly violent. There were times at night when I would be woken with a blinding flash of light. It was lightning, bright enough to wake me even though I only had the smallest of windows, and covered with curtains at that. The light would be followed by a few seconds later by earache inducing thunder. I was generally afraid and awed.
They don’t have thunderstorms like that here in California. Especially those violent summer thunderstorms. In my time here, it has almost happened once. There was a bit of lightning and the air smelled like it does during a thunderstorm, but there was only a bit of a drizzle of rain, and the whole thing was over in 15 minutes. If the show I had been watching at the time was any good, I would have missed the “storm” completely.
