Ask Lemmy

March 1993: The Storm of the Century. It caused snow to fall in every part of Georgia. From the mountains down to the Florida line.

In the north Georgia mountains it caused a thunder blizzard. High winds, lightning, and 3+ feet of snow in a matter of hours. This is in a part of the country that rarely gets a dusting of snow. 10s of thousands of trees down. The sound of pine trees snapping in the middle of the night sounded like cannon's being fired. Power was out for more than a week in many places in the mountains. It took four days for me to get a clear path cut from my home to the main road.

The first shower I had in more than a week was when I made it down to Atlanta for the Grateful Dead shows.

Worst: Driving through a large Midwest city in the US on the freeway. Started raining. NBD. Then it got a lot harder. The wind really picked up fast. I've been around gust fronts and the like for thunderstorms before, this was unlike anything I've been through before. It got wild, fast. Tree parts and other debris started blowing past, it looked like what you'd think a tornado would, but it was far too widespread. Then the crazy thing...along with the wind, rain, and debris, the visibility dropped to near zero with a fog or mist in the span of a minute. We had to pull over and stop with everyone else, nobody could see for a few minutes. I have never seen that happen before, the rapid and violent change to weather and visibility over such a large area.

Coolest: Driving over the western High Desert in the US. Got caught up in a snowstorm with lots of wind. Found a safe place to spend the night after some white-knuckle driving for an hour or two. Plenty of vehicles pushed by wind or slid off the road, we were some of the only stupid ones left driving. No place to park safely, not enough gas for the rest of the night to keep warm. Don't want to be the dead ones found with CO poisoning by the highway patrol the next day. Anyway, woke up the next day and it was crystal clear, literally. The air was full of fine ice crystals blowing in the wind. The bright sun had a huge halo and cross like a "+" along with some other tangential arcs that felt both close and far away to us at ground level. I'm sure folks in colder climes see these, but it was a new one to me. Pretty wild to see.

To answer the title question... many years ago I experienced a polar vortex that caused about a 100 degree temperature drop in less than 24 hours, that was pretty fun.

To address the body of OP, I would start taking important things out of the house and storing them somewhere safe.. but I would think more storms = more damage = more likely the insurance cant deny you.

Not the worst, but the weirdest happened while I was fishing in Minnesota. We were in a boat on an empty lake. It was a bright clear day without a could in the sky. While we fished we watched a single small black cloud blow over the lake. As we watched, this little lone angry cloud homed in right for our boat. Just before it passed over us, it started dumping rain. It wasn't more than 100ft wide, but it passed right over us. After that the cloud dissipated and blew away. The weather was totally clear the rest of the day. It was the most personalized storm ever.

-40F to +40F in about a four hour period.

Maybe hail. At least one of the times I saw hail. It was a clear and sunny day without a cloud in the sky

Or a wall of rain. Once when I was a kid it was a race to get home: a wall of rain was coming through and I tried to make it back in time to stay dry

Closest I've had is weather that starts on one block but suddenly is completely different on another. What I mean is you'll get rain on one block and then it almost magically won't continue next block over despite basically having those same exact rain clouds.

Perfect example: a couple blocks away from me a few days ago it started suddenly pouring rain like Noah was building his ark. Went a couple blocks away and there isn't a single drop to be found anywhere.

Although, there is another weird thing I am not 100% sure I hallucinated weather wise. My neck of the woods doesn't get any sort of tornadoes, twisters, whatever. But one day in 8th grade, during some cheesy "you're moving onto high school" type celebration, we were all out in a large field where all the festivities were set up. I swear some tiny, insignificant tornado or something spawned because I swear I remember blades of grass and some inflatable ball being picked up and moved around. Again, I'm not sure if that was a hallucination

blizzard of 78.

so much snow entire families were begging to get out of their homes for it.

2 cyclones and a

firestorm (pyro cumulonimbus) that destroyed our village and a zillion acres in Australia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulonimbus_flammagenitus

I'd take the cyclone

also 3 minor earthquakes (northern Thailand, New Zealand and The Philippines, in a what the fucking, fuck was that as the building shakes and near one volcano (Taal), I was in Tagaytay

I'm jinxed :)

When it's raining but just in, like, one spot where you can go into it and then go out of it again is just about the craziest weather I've experienced.

Unless earthquakes count as "weather." I was in "the big one" of '89 in California. I was only 4, but I remember it knocking me down when I was walking across the street and then sprinting home because of it.

I don't remember really, but I jumped into a wave during a storm as a kid. It plowed my face along the sand, scraping it.

Well I've got three answers to that.

The most severe weather I sheltered in place from was hurricane Fran. Fortunately it didn't rearrange my family's own chunk of the forest too bad but some trees were thrown on a few houses.

The most severe weather I've experienced unsheltered was Hurricane Noel. The dumbfuck 20 year old I used to be decided to ride a motorcycle from Daytona to West Palm Beach for no particular reason. I got my giblets rinsed. That wasn't the most unpleasant weather I've ever been in though, I rode that same motorcycle through a freezing rain storm about 3 years later. I kept having to pound my fist into my visor to de-ice it.

The worst aftermath of weather I've seen but wasn't personally in was an EF-3 tornado. It was on the ground for over an hour, it cut a path a thousand feet wide and easily 50 miles long, tearing through forest, neighborhoods and commercial districts. I worked as a flight instructor at a nearby airport, so afterward I got a fairly good look at the damage path from the air. It looked kind of like a logging operation, you know how they'll take a parcel of land and clear cut it either for development or for the timber? Except smeared across the landscape crossing roads and taking houses and buildings with the trees.

There was one day in my city where a catastrophic hailstorm absolutely brought the city to a standstill. Hail the size of golf balls clogged drains, causing roads everywhere to flood and stopping traffic, but more importantly, dented the skin and smashed the windscreens of like 30% of the cars in the city, writing them off.

I worked for an autoglass supplier at the time, and for the next 2 weeks, we were shipping every bit of glass we could get our hands on until the warehouse was bare. Glaziers were working 16 hours a day to fix the glass on thousands of cars. It was pretty wild.

During a heatwave here in the UK earlier this year I was travelling down south. But for 10 minutes out of nowhere we got literal apocalyptic levels of halistones. It sounded like they were going to pierce through the roof of my car. It became hard to see and loads of people actually ended up pulling over just in case. Then it just ended as quickly as it started and 5 minutes later it was so hot again that there was no trace of any water anywhere.

This actually happened again a week or two later, but I was at home so it wasn't as crazy feeling as it was whilst driving.

Where I'm from, we're having volcanic ash right now.

Was in a tornado that tore the roof up and collapsed the building I was in. It's a miracle I survived. If I wouldn't have dove into the doorway the walls would have crushed me.

It does, in fact, sound exactly like a train barreling through your living room.

Hurricane with 2 week blackout following it.

Tornado but it was a block away - the sky was GREEN. I looked out the window and thought "that's odd" then my brother called and said there is a tornado by you go take the kids to an interior room (hallway was best we could do). It knocked down a checkers and a car dealership, tossed cars around.

The ice storm in Ontario back in 1998.

In 2022 we had "calima" in southern Spain. It happens when wind blows in sand from Sahara and is quite common but this one was insane. I only have one shitty picture of it:

There's no filter here and it's in the middle of the day. This is what everything looked like. This is what it normally looks like:

It was as if the whole world got an instant sepia filter. When you were walking outside you could fell the sand in your eyes. Everything got covered in a thin layer of red sand. They had to pressure wash the whole region:

Flash flood on the freeway back from Vegas. It was raining so hard we had to yell over it, then a semi passed us, dumped a waterfall on the windshield and the car in fronts tail lights stretched so far vertically we couldn't gauge distance anymore and pulled over.

In my infinite wisdom after a week of filandering in the desert I elected to "experience the storm," I got out, raised my arms, and felt every hair on my body stand up.

Scurried back in before my appointment with God.

I’ve been in 3 tornadoes… don’t wish to be in any more. If you see a green sky, get into a basement if you can and an interior room if you can’t.

I see I’ve got a fellow Hurricane Floyd survivor here. Here’s my story:

I was living in eastern NC at the time. What I remember is they expected the storm to pass through during the night. So we hunkered down, went to bed, I remember waking up a couple times during the night and hearing the wind but I didn’t get up to look.

In the morning I stepped outside and discovered that I couldn’t go anywhere. My apartment was at the top of an incline near a creek and most of what was below us was underwater. So many of my neighbors lost their homes, their cars…the streets were flooded. It was like living on an island. We had no power so I cooked with a little propane camping grill. I remember power being out for a couple days. Only once the power came back on did we realize the full extent of the damage. I vividly remember aerial footage of dead livestock floating in floodwaters.

I worked at a small music store at the time and it got completely gutted. Flood water came in the back entrance, went out the front entrance, and carried almost all our gear away with it. We had to reconstruct the entire interior of the building and purchase all new inventory. We weren’t able to open for business for almost two weeks.

Funny story about that: A few weeks later a guy came in carrying a power amp he said he found about a quarter mile away alongside the highway. He assumed it was ours. We checked the serial number and it was in fact ours, but by that time we had already received insurance and emergency funds and were able to write off almost all the lost inventory. So we said he could keep it. Couple weeks later he came back, said he disassembled it, let it all air dry for a couple days, reassembled it, and it worked fine. Dude scored a $700 power amp for free.

Hurricane.

Winds were so strong I could hear the house creaking as it was passing over. Stripped the shingles off my roof to where it was raining in the bedrooms. Ceilings collapsed because the insulation and drywall became waterlogged. I got hit on the head from that because I was trying to pull stuff out of the master bedroom before everything got waterlogged. Fortunately, drywall was soft enough where it didn't cause a concussion. Tree fell on my home. Another lucky break because it was only leaning on it and didn't cause any structural damage.

Next day rode around on my bike to see the extent of the damage. Shingles everywhere. Some with the roofing nails still attached, and some were embedded into the siding of various homes. All wooden privacy fences knocked down, destroyed. A few of the slats were broken up to the point where they looked like crude wooden spears. A bunch of duplexes had their fire alarms constantly beeping. Not because there was a fire, but because they were running on battery power instead of mains power (really stupid design).

Saw one home were it was a two story but became a one story. Roof completely collapsed in. 2nd floor walls mostly gone. Inside I could see a tangled mess of the family's furniture and the wooden support structure.

For the 2nd worse home I saw, the wind had pushed in where the garage door used to be and ripped off the roof from the inside. About 2/3rds of the trust structure was exposed to the elements. That one hit me in the feels because I had just met that family the week before.

Venturing out further, most of the power poles were knocked and the power lines and transformers were laying in the streets. All the stop lights were dead, obviously from the lack of power. Most survived the winds though. Most of the trees, if there weren't knocked over, had their leaves stripped off. Stop signs, they were gone. The wind shook them back and forth so much that the metal became fatigued and snapped them off by the base. Saw the same thing with a tractor trailer. Looked like Godzilla snapped it in half, all from the wind and metal fatigue.

Over the next couple of days, it was a constant wailing of ambulances. They were evacuating patients out of the hospitals.

That was definitely an experience, living in a half destroyed home for a year rebuilding and dealing with an insurance company that was ill equipped to handle the influx of claims.

I mean I live in Nebraska so outside of tornados, hail, downpours, thunder-snow, 90 mph wind gusts, and extreme temperature changes over 24 hours ive seen mostly everything nature can throw at us.

I guess the weirdest was this one. In Nebraska weather at least during heavy thunderstorms comes from west and travels east. Sometimes from the south and sometimes north but never from the east.

This one came from the west, went east. Stopped, went back west with no precip and sat there building for a couple of hours. When it finally pushed east again. It was one of the hardest rainfalls I've ever seen

My story is more tame compared to the others listed, but still a wild 15 minutes for me.

I was walking from my house to a friend's on a warm April day. As I left my house I saw some rain clouds but figured it was a quick 15 minute walk and I'd be fine, no need for an umbrella.

The first five minutes of my walk, the clouds quickly changed, shit, rain was coming. Sure enough, downpour. Buckets of water coming out of the sky.

Then it paused, for a moment, only for it to start hailing. Bright sun but hail dropping from the sky.

Then nothing. Clear skys, bright sun, a beautiful April day. I picked the exact wrong 15 minutes to go outside.

In the early 2000s I was at the beach on Long Island. It was midday, a cloudless sky, and hot. Suddenly there was a lot of shouting and pointing, and off in the distance you could barely see a water spout, like a tornado over the water and made of water. It went up into this tiny, dense little cluster of angry looking clouds that were just completely alone in the sky. As it got closer it started to hail golfball-size hailstones they were kind of hollow, like the good, crunchy ice from a fast food soda fountain. We got pelted for maybe 30 seconds and then the spout changed directions and headed out to sea, and the weather went back to normal as if nothing had happened. I occasionally ask my sister (who was there with me at the time) if she remembers, because it seems so odd I think I’m gaslighting myself.

Is that not what house insurance is for?

The top two:

• Hurricane Fran, which actually made landfall 30 years ago today. Our house at the time was about 120 miles (200 km) inland, but the storm was moving fast and still had a lot of power even that far in. Combined with the ground already being saturated with days of rain before the storm, the state lost millions of trees. We had my grandmother come stay with us because she had a large tree right next to her house. We lost power that night around 9:30 or 10. Maybe around 2 or 3 AM things started getting really bad. At some point my dad thought he heard a different sound in the wind and we all got in an interior closet on the ground floor. Eventually it sounded better but I didn’t go back to sleep until daylight. Our house didn’t have any damage but there was a thick line of trees in the woods behind our house that were all knocked down, kind of spiraling along the line. Never got the weather service to verify if that was a tornado because there was so much damage everywhere. Surprisingly my grandmother’s house was fine and she had electricity back the day after the storm, so we all went to stay with her except for my dad, who kept staying at our house to keep an eye on it. It took us a week to get power back at our house.
• When I was 5 an F4 tornado came about a mile from our house. It actually crossed my cousin’s street a quarter mile from their house. Other than a young tree that was permanently bent sideways our house was fine, but 4 people were killed. We used to drive down a street where a couple people died pretty regularly, but once my parents realized it was scaring me they had to take a longer route. All that was left there were foundations and staircases. If a house doesn’t have a basement, the closet under the stairs is my next choice for tornado shelter.

We get the occasional tornado here, but thankfully I have never seen one up close.

We get a shit-ton of hailstorms though, and occasionally the hailstones are big enough that if you're outside during one, you'll probably need a trip to the hospital. A lot of the older cars have golfball style dents and pretty much everyone has a story about trying to get insurance payots for holes in the siding of their house.

weather around here (central switzerland) is normally pretty mild, but a few years ago there was this extremely localized burst of intense hail that went through my town. the hailstones were maybe 7cm across, on my entire street every single solar panel/skylight/south-facing window without overhang/car windshield was completely smashed to bits. nearer the village center the hail wasn't as big, but there was so much of it that there was a mountain of hail sitting outside the train station for a week in midsummer heat.

In Ramsgate, Kent a couple years ago we had a lightning storm that lasted hours, with bolts nearby every few minutes or seconds for the whole time. Rain coming down like pencils, ten seconds outside drenched me completely. Lightning is my favourite weather to watch, it used to give me a frisson. That night I got bored of it.

almost got direct hit by a night tornado while driving home from work. it killed something like 5 or 6 people on the freeway, and the only reason I saw it was because it hit a transformer junction after the freeway which backlit it.

I turned around to avoid an intercept course and sped back down the highway and it then crossed the lake and smashed several whole neighborhoods where friends of mine lived, including my gf at the time.

when I got to the intersection with the freeway there were cars just sitting there at the red light, wind raging and howling, signs swinging back and forth, literal tumbleweed rolling through lmao. ironically it was a cop car reaching the intersection after me that flashed his lights and horns/sirens that made everyone snap out of it and we all ran the red light together.

tried to go back down the original route towards my friends blocks but between downed power lines, chunks of house blocking the roads and emergency services setting up I couldn't get very far.

edit to add uplifting part: one of my friends whose house was destroyed kept parakeets. over a year later, after the rebuild, they were walking their dog and heard chirping from a neighbor's garage. they had taken shelter there and the neighbor was taking care of them, was happy to return them. :)