Spring Weather 2011

Hope everyone is safe and dry with all the bad storms and flooding down south.

After 15 inches of rain the last few days, not terribly dry. Lost power and phone/Internet during the storms and did not get the Internet back until yesterday afternoon. I have my diesel generator for power but no backup Internet.

It was interesting that I got the phone back on Tuesday but no DSL. When I called up the phone company to report the outage the gal said that it was a fiber line break that was separate from the phones fiber. She went on to mention that it took a specially trained person to do the splice and there was only one or two people for the entire State area that had the ability and equipment to do it.

Lots of road damage in my area from flash floods. I spent yesterday cleaning up my access road. A lot of the rock and gravel got washed off it. At times during the more intense thunder storms the rain came down like it was coming from a fire hose.

I see by the news this morning that the loss of property and lives has been high due to this storm period. My sympathies to all those that have suffered.

Glad to hear you're safe, if not dry. I can see getting by without power, but no Internet! How horrifying!

The storms farther East sound really bad. Interesting that tornadoes are now hitting towns and cities instead of the more traditional open space between them. It would be interesting to know the reason why.

Lovely spring weather here, along with the annual rapid vegetation growth, the race to keep up, and the horrors of hay fever.

Today is a day of waiting for the new granddaughter to arrive. Labor was induced this morning, the baby is scheduled for tonight.

For once I am not accountable for the weather. Hope everybody is safe

Glad to hear you're safe Matt. All the rain sounds a lot like what we got last spring. The damage in Alabama over night is simply horrible. Makes me glad the parents are going to put a tornado safe room in their new house.

@bozo the vegetation is rapidly growing here too. Well at least the grass I just got done mowing. Unfortunately the crops haven't been able to get planted yet.

Looks to be a bad crop year if the weather do not improve. Hate to see what the fuel price and the bad weather does to food prices by Fall. Of course we can buy it with our newly deflated currency. Brother can you spare a $100 bill?

We still have lots of time to plant a crop, and the next week looks like its going to stay dry enough to get into the fields. We haven't had a lot of rain here, but its just stayed wet enough to keep farmers out of the fields. To be honest I don't really remember much planting until May anyway when I was still living at home.

All of our crops are planted at least. Most of the crops are planted across Iowa, but I hear the states to the east are still to wet.

The damage in Joplin is unbelievable to see on TV. I would say they are very lucky that the death toll isn't 3 times higher from the looks of things.

Saw some of the pictures of the damage Joplin, Mo. suffered. It looks like the city was nuked. Terrible the loss of life.

I have been having thunderstorms and massive rainstorms all day. I do not live all that far from the Missouri line and the storms keep rolling in from Texas and Oklahoma. Expect it will mean more flood loss for people downstream through out the Mississippi drainage. They have been releasing water from the dams that are near by since the reservoirs are all filled to the brim. This means flooding along the White river. I noticed that floods have damaged one of the main roads in my County. Have had my power flicker a few times but it is still working.

Boy, it has been a interesting year for disasters.

The weather has been unusually severe this year. We had snow Sunday which brought a lot of trees down and flattened other vegetation since it's late enough that everything had leafed out. A friend that grows peaches and other fruits had just put out the bird netting over their raspberries said it looked like the berries had been run over by a steam roller. Their attempts to get the netting off was useless, due to several inches of "Sierra cement", the really wet, heavy snow we often get. don't know yet if the vines will recover or not. I think the storms rapid melting did more damage to my driveway than the rest of winter combined.

Yeah the heavy rain and hail has fairly flattened most of my little garden. Bout all that is left is a few tomato plants standing. Good thing I do not rely on a garden to feed myself.

It looks to be another day for severe weather in the heartland.

Keep your eyes peeled for those tornadoes! Have you got a storm shelter (aka "safe room")? How to Build a Storm Shelter Arkansas is right in the middle of Zone IV on the Wind Zone map. Wind Zones in the U.S. Actually sounds like kind of a fun project. You end up with a vault, too, I'd put in my Internet access there and keep the computers there. Surrounded by metal so you could take your tin foild hat off and give your head some air. I think I'd make the door open in, though; not so easy to get trapped.

Stay safe!

I've been trying to convince dad that when they build a safe room in the new house that it needs a cement ceiling or something besides the upstairs floor.

Personally I'm thinking about looking into one of the premade above ground shelters to put behind my house.

Do not have a shelter room myself. Being that my place is in the mountains and heavily forested, the tornadoes tend to go North or South where more open level ground exists to help them form up, so less of a danger. Not that they can not happen in the mountains but it is much more rare. Air currents around mountains, I suspect, change the dynamics that help to create a tornado vortex.

I see by the news that Oklahoma has been hit pretty badly tonight and the front is moving slowly Northeast wards. With it being dark it is much more dangerous for people since they will not see it coming and maybe asleep. Hope the front starts to break apart soon.

penguins are to bottom heavy to be affected by tornadoes, but we do enjoy the spin....

I do have a crawlspace I can get down in, but that's not completely safe either.

If you look at the plans in the link I posted, they have you double the joists in the ceilings, then put two sheets of 3/4" plywood, grain oriented perpendicularly, and a sheet of 14 gauge steel. Sounds stout enough to me, unless you have something really heavy above you.

I'd be a little spooked about going into the crawl space, unless the floor above was reinforced, and egress was really close by. Maybe I'm a little claustrophobic?

Had storms here last week with 80-100 mph winds. Caused some tree damage and layed a lot of corn down. This week the heat is beyond description. Hope anyone else in it has a good air conditioner.

My relatives in MI and MO have been complaining about the heat. One cousin in MI claims while she was in the pool the devil swam by saying,"Thank God for community pools!". She has a reputation for perhaps stretching the truth a little at times. Another cousins county fair is starting this week. It's going to be rough times for the animals. The smaller critters, chickens and rabbits, etc, can have ice bottles in their cages, but how do you freeze an ice bottle big enough for a pig? With the humidity they have I doubt misters would be very effective. We've only topped 100 a day or two, mostly we've had very pleasant below average temperatures. 80's this week. And we get dry heat.

My BIL is with the Corps of Engineers and has been in Joplin since a day or two after the tornado (with a week off a few weeks ago to take a breather). The clean up is going well, there's just so much of it. I don't know how much longer he's going to be there. He's been the spokesperson for the Corps several times, so you may have seen him on TV or in the papers.

I don't believe I've ever been in 100 mph winds, maybe 70's tops. I can imagine the force there.

Take care, all of you, and don't forget to check in. When I don't hear anything for a while I start to worry.

Mother Bozo

Everyone I know that's been through Joplin says its indescribable. This is supposed to be the last really hot day here for awhile at least, but now we have storm chances coming in. The weather people say we are on a record setting run of days in a row with temps over 90F. The last couple of days real temp got up to 99 with heat index of 115+.

The Heat is getting old. No relief in my area for the foreseeable future. I would not want to be any of the poor folks in Joplin forced to work outdoors recovering from the storm damage. For me once the temperature hits above 92F I am forced to find AC or a cool shady place.

Not that getting hot in the Summer Time is unusual for these parts. From what I glean from the Weatherman, what is unusual is the number of days above average.

Hope everyone is doing good.

I feel for you guys. What's been remarkable here has been the number of days below average; lots of days in the 70's and 80's. So the average of your average and ours would about... average? This global warming stuff confuses me. HOpe you all get some relief, and that your AC's don't melt. Where's welan with his mondo coolers, anyway?

I've been trying to get welan to turn on the mondo chillers, but think he's retreated to his north pole igloo or gone to the southern hemisphere for their winter.

well. if somebody hadn't stuffed all those corn stalks into my chillers.......

Throw a little kerosene on them, and they should burn right out of there.