Posted: 5/22/2011 6:54:33 PM EDT
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An "interesting" storm passed through tonight in Northern Illinois.
It started with a brief but intense burst of rain in the afternoon and then cleared up for a while, so i took the opportunity to go visit my wife in the rehab place where she has been staying the last month or so. While I was there, my wife was watching local weather. The stations are all physically located to the west of town so they saw it first. The weather people on several of the stations went and hid in the basements of the stations as the storm passed over. The worst of it only lasted a few minutes as the storm was moving at 60+ mph. The rehab place got all the patients out of their rooms and put them in the hallway when their weather radio indicated a tornado warning. The lights blinked a few times, and there was marble size hail for about 30 seconds, but that was about it. I left later on and went home. On the way I saw a neighborhood adjacent to ours with no power, but our power was still on. There was some small branches down in our yard, and part of a tree blew over across the road in front of the house. Part of the fence belonging to the next door cemetery blew over, as did our decorative windmill. Oddly, a very heavy planter (maybe 40 pounds) full of dirt blew off the porch railing. I went out with my mag light and looked around. Did not appear to be any serious damage. It had been lightly raining since I left the rehab place and while I was outside it started raining a little heavier so I went inside. Later a police car came and sat in front of my house with his lights on by the downed tree. |
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My son and I were on the way back from Chicago and ran into this storm on I-55. It rained hard enough for most cars to pull over except for a few that
ran with the emergency flashers on. Almost enough wind to blow a super cab F250 SuperDuty longbed off the road a few times. I really felt sorry for those poor guys I saw on motorcycles taking shelter under the overpass. The state police even stopped to check on them. Then a few miles later, all the heavy stuff stopped and just light rain the rest of the way. |
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Flooding all over the place here. I'm glad I was driving the truck as the roads were 8-14" deep and we're not talking about underpasses or viaducts. Roughly about 2" in a few hours this morning and now it's pouring again.
My sump pumps are working hard and have not argued once yet (fingers crossed), the foundation is still holding dry so all the work has turned out well I think. My only wish is a nice straight line wind or hail storm to knock over my useless garage and replace the siding on the house 
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