Midwest storms last week

[Brucom]

We still have thousands of people without electricity.
Here's where the tree fell on the condo two buildings over from us.
Can you tell there's a man standing on the roof?

[Rick Denney]

Not just the Midwest. This derecho event didn't stop until it got over the Atlantic.

We have about 15 trees down in our yard, and our power just can back on a while ago. Still don't have phone service.

It was fast! It formed up with a single thunderstorm cell near Chicago and past that city about 2 PM. It his my niece's residence in Columbus about 5 PM. It hit us at 10PM. We were watching lots of distant lightning for about 20 minutes, then WHAM! 6-8 minutes of 80-mph winds, trees falling, power going out, howling that reminded me of the last hurricane I rode out down in Texas. Then, we had 30 minutes of hard rain, and then it was done. I've never seen anything like it.

Rick "noting that half of all power outages from this storm were in the DC metro area" Denney

[Steve Marcus]

I was scheduled to play in a Dixieland band in a parade this morning in Wheaton, IL.

Yesterday, the town declared itself a disaster area, cancelling its fireworks display last night and its parade this morning.

Sure, some people and I for whom this was a paying engagement are out some $$.

But that's trivial compared to the estimate that the people of Wheaton will be without power until at least the end of the week. Some suffered structural damage and other misfortune in that storm.

[Rick Denney]

google "Hurricane Elvis".

- much smaller geographic area
- higher speed winds (some over 100 mph)
- affected over 1,000,000 people
- passed directly (and precisely) over Memphis metropolitan area (all of it: no more - and no less)

Yes, Hurrican Elvis was a similar progressive derecho, but it just wasn't big enough to match this one. The June 29 storm will have the gold star in the derecho list. For one thing, it taught us all the definition of "derecho".

I'm not sure the winds in the Memphis storm were consistently higher, or whether a higher gust happened to hit an official monitoring station. Severe derechos are driven by the jet stream, though, which is often moving at such speeds. When the conditions are right, the heat and humidity present can feed and sustain a squall line that is moving at jet stream speeds, and that's when these events really cause a lot of damage. As the thunderstorms cool raise surface air to the top of the cloud, it spills over and falls back to the ground, and then spreads out in all directions. That part of that "outflow" that moves in the direction of the storm adds to the speed the storm is being driven by the jet stream, and thus you can have localized microbursts well in excess of what happens to hit the anemometer at the airport. The outflow in the reverse direction simply cancels the speed of the storm, creating a bit of apparent calm. That's really nearly as bad, because it creates a whipping action with the microbursts and gusts, which pine trees in particular do not like.

We've done a more careful accounting of the damage: 27 trees on the ground or damaged too severely to save.

We cleared about 100 trees last winter because they were too close to the house. We liked those trees and the still-being-restored bare land in the cleared area had kind of freaked us out. But this storm reminded us why we did it. That area has now been invaded by the tops of about a dozen large pines--tops being defined as anything from the top half to everything more than three feet above the ground. Had one of the trees we cleared broken that close to the ground, our house could look like the one pictured above.

The power outage tooks its toll, too. The surge was severe. It fried two of the three uninterruptible power supplies I use, but at least they gave their lives to protect the TV and computer equipment plugged into them. The electronics in our expensive clothes dryer fried--a new control board is on the way. Several surge protectors apparently included compressed smoke as one of their components. All that smoke was released, and now they don't work. The "whole-house" surge protectors I installed in the two panels are black around the edges, and obviously weren't quite enough. The refrigerator, well pump, and AC blower were saved--they were attached to the generator source through a transfer switch when the power came back on. Every one of the compact flourescent bulbs that was turned on when the power came back on was destroyed.

Too much of what we own these days is run by software which runs on 5-volt logic circuits, many with CMOS chips. These circuits are extremely vulnerable to electrostatic discharge and voltages being out of range. They are protected with voltage-regulator chips in their power supplies, but those switching power supplies also contain components that are vulnerable to surges. It's the power supply portion of the control board for our dryer that seems to have blown. I need to rethink voltage stabilization for our house, and not just for the computers.

Rick "glad to have power restored" Denney

[tbn.al]

I don't know about that Joe. My AC guy said mine failed because I didn't turn the thermostat up and it ran constantly. He said if you ask a system to cool more than 30 degrees under the outside temperature it stresses the compressor. Maybe it's a plot to get us to buy more AC equipment.

[bort]

With all the crappy weather you've had in the past few years, looks like I moved out of Maryland at the right time!

Good luck, Rick! Guess you're set for firewood and mulch for a while!

[Rick Denney]

With all the crappy weather you've had in the past few years, looks like I moved out of Maryland at the right time!

Good luck, Rick! Guess you're set for firewood and mulch for a while!

Mulch, yes. But not firewood (except from that sweetgum tree that got knocked down). The white pines we have are too resinous to use as firewood--they coke up a chimney in no time.

Rick "which is why we have a pile o' logs we can't get anybody to take away" Denney

[Rick Denney]

' got an unwanted ravine? We (neighbors and I) toss too-small-or-too-rotten-to-be-worth-cutting-up-into-firewood limbs - etc. - into the bottoms of ravines that tend to run between our properties or in isolated parts of our properties. We all try to toss that stuff to the bottoms of the ravines (as we nurture the wild ferns), and in a few short years it all rots and morphs to dirt. Leaves tend to catch on it and (yes) some of the ravines are filling in a bit. Pine rots fairly quickly...

Wish I did. Previous owner split that part of the lot (5 acres) off and sold it probably half a dozen years before we bought what was left.

Rick "who already has filled up various potential piles of rotting timber" Denney

[Rick Denney]

Well, there is one good outcome. After removing the deceased all-in-one laser machine, which had always been troublesome anyway, I was researching new all-in-ones, because I really need to be able to make copies and fax things if I am to be allowed to work at home a couple days a week. The Internet connection was just terrible--which it always is for me, anyway, because the only solution available to me Verizon Mobile Broadband. My modem kept losing 3G and switching to 1X, which is dial-up speed, but when it did the modem would hang and require rebooting.

While my 3G coverage has always been weak, which limits speed, it has not come and gone quite so frustratingly. So, I looked on Verizon's web site to see if I could find who to call to determine when they would be fixing what must have been storm damage to one of their towers. I happened across their current coverage map.

Hey, what's that dark red? I'm used to bright red, which denotes 3G coverage. Hey! Dark red is LTE--4G!

So, I reconfigured my modem and my Cradlepoint router to attempt a 4G connection, and lo and behold! I'm now getting 10 to 12 megabits per second coming down and about 400K going up. And it's reliable (sort-of--I only had to re-establish my VPN connection to the office three or four times during the day).

My wife and I could actually both work at home and log into our work networks at the same time! Who knew?

Rick "who might never have checked if Verizon's 3G antenna hadn't been damaged" Denney