Who got whacked by the Derecho?

[Pgg365247]

A derecho (Spanish: derecho "straight", pronounced [de̞ˈɾe̞tʃo̞][SUP][1][/SUP]), is a widespread and long-lived, violent convectively induced straight-line windstorm that is associated with a fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms in the form of a squall line usually taking the form of abow echo. Derechos blow in the direction of movement of their associated storms, similar to a gust front, except that the wind is sustained and generally increases in strength behind the "gust" front. A warm weather phenomenon, derechos occur mostly in summer, especially June and July in the Northern Hemisphere. They can occur at any time of the year and occur as frequently at night as in the daylight hours.



So I live in Northern Virginia in the National Capital region and we got whacked pretty bad by this storm. Anyone else get hit by this thing? I grew up in North Florida and have lived through some serious weather. I have to say I have never seen a storm like this before... this was 15 mins of crazy violent weather!

 

[diyguy]

I live in Vienna and am still without power. No house damage though --- thank God.

 

[Manning]

Yep, pretty bad. The yard looks like a disaster zone, still. Fortunately, we do have power.

 

[Lamb Root]

Just red it on the news. Sorry to hear about that.

 

[Haggises]

Good luck to those who got hit.
Philly I dont think was hit too hard.

 

[Patman27]

I got whacked; flying into NC. We are safe. Our luggage is in absentia. Only wet shaving mishap may be a lost Wee Scot and some Ligne St Barth apres rasage I was looking forward to trying out. I am tired of talking to answering machines and voice recognition computers, so I think I'm about to head back to the airport and be a pain. I'm looking at you US Air...

...So I go to the airport and there sat my bag. If only there was someone instead of a machine to work the phone, it would have saved me some trouble. Still, everyone I was able to speak to was very nice. I guess it just pays to speak face to face and, now I get to try my mint/aloe aftershave

 

[Mick]

Just got back power a few hours ago.

We have an emergency generator and I run extension cords to appliances, computer, fans, etc.

Went through 30 gallons of gas in the past week keeping everything going.

Power was brought back on here 2 days ago. Winked out after 10 minutes which was long enough for me to take a warm shower. We have a natural gas tankless hot water heater which needs 120 vac to run so it's been a week's worth of cold showers and that really sux...

they got the power on again last night around midnight and it was still on this morning at 5 am but by 6 it was gone again

Hopefully the power will stay on this time for more than a short while.

BTW it has been between 98-105 every day the power was out. Our basement stayed at 76 which was NICE......

Been cold water shaving every day even with no power. you just gotta love wet shaving. No power... No problem

 

[Bruce Wayne]

It started in my neck of the woods...

 

[Slowhand]

we got a little taste of it in lexington, ky

 

[KipNoxzema]

The last time I had a Derecho, I was left with one shoe and she never returned my phone calls.

 

[Pgg365247]

We had another round of bad storms two nights ago. This time 60+ mph winds, torrential rain, and penny sized hail. I am not sure what the heck is going on in Northern Virginia with these weird weather phenomenon events but I am over it. My 85 yr old grandmother and mother lives with my mother in south central Virginia and their house has been without power since last Friday. Every hotel/motel/B&B in town was booked. I finally convinced them to come up and stay with me on Monday so they didn't have to suffer in the heat. On a side note... I wish I had enough money to give all these electrical workers a raise for busting their humps to get our power back on in this heat wave. If you are reading this guys/gals, thank you!

I really don't want to start a global warming or political argument in this thread but I sure wish some of our tax dollars could be used to upgrade the electrical grid and put some of these lines underground. It might be a good way to create some jobs and gives us better power stability. Just my 2 cents...

 

[AverageJoe]

This is nothing against the OP since I know this term was coined already, but I always think it's so funny when people try to come up with new words, terms, names, etc. for things that don't really need it!! 'Derecho'???? Come on, people------it's a storm. If you need to further clarify, you can add 'high-winds, torrential downpours, lightning, thunderstorm, tornado, hurricane' or anything else. It just sounds so self-important to try to add 'new' words to our language when they are not needed.

 

[The Nid Hog]

I was on the road in MD when it hit. It was quite an experience navigating the highway then the streets of Bethesda when the storm was at its worst. Made it to my hotel just as it was beginning to die down. Fortunately, we got there OK and all the power was on too.

This is nothing against the OP since I know this term was coined already, but I always think it's so funny when people try to come up with new words, terms, names, etc. for things that don't really need it!! 'Derecho'???? Come on, people------it's a storm. If you need to further clarify, you can add 'high-winds, torrential downpours, lightning, thunderstorm, tornado, hurricane' or anything else. It just sounds so self-important to try to add 'new' words to our language when they are not needed.

Language is like a living thing. It changes as its users change and as the situations that it has to describe change. I don't see what the problem is with that. Besides, who's to say where we should freeze the language? I like the fact that our language is so dynamic. Like everything else, YMMV or, better yet, TTOSBT (To thine own self be true).

 

[Pgg365247]

This is nothing against the OP since I know this term was coined already, but I always think it's so funny when people try to come up with new words, terms, names, etc. for things that don't really need it!! 'Derecho'???? Come on, people------it's a storm. If you need to further clarify, you can add 'high-winds, torrential downpours, lightning, thunderstorm, tornado, hurricane' or anything else. It just sounds so self-important to try to add 'new' words to our language when they are not needed.

I took no offense at all...

The term "Derecho" (http://www.spc.noaa.gov/misc/AbtDerechos/derechofacts.htm) was coined by Dr. Gustavus Hinrichs, a physics professor at the University of Iowa, in a paper published in the American Meteorological Journal in 1888 (so it has been around a while). "Derecho", "La Nina" and "El Nino" (http://www.elnino.noaa.gov/) are all legit weather terms (just like "Hurricane", "Tornado", "Typhoon" etc.) These are terms used by the NOAA and other weather experts to describe weather phenomenon, not something that most lehman use. I was actually going to post an attempt at humor by writing something like "The Mexicans have a weather machine" but I have found all too often that humor through the internet doesn't always come through the way it was intended. My wife and children are Mexican (children are 1/2 Caucasian and 1/2 Latino) so I in no way meant it as being offensive. Similar to you, I find it odd that all of these crazy weather phenomenon have an official weather term in Spanish to "label" them.

 

[jazzman]

This is nothing against the OP since I know this term was coined already, but I always think it's so funny when people try to come up with new words, terms, names, etc. for things that don't really need it!! 'Derecho'???? Come on, people------it's a storm. If you need to further clarify, you can add 'high-winds, torrential downpours, lightning, thunderstorm, tornado, hurricane' or anything else. It just sounds so self-important to try to add 'new' words to our language when they are not needed.

I don't care what it's called, but I've never seen anything like it before. The bad part only lasted about 15 minutes. Not much rain; heat lightning keeping the sky fairly bright with a variety of colors, but no bolts of lightning; very large trees moving more than I've seen in regular thunderstorms or tail ends of hurricanes, with wind speeds reported at 80 mph; many cars and houses in the neighborhood damaged. The largest nearby above-ground power lines were hit by trees at several points. After 15 minutes, it became a regular summer rainstorm. The next day, a large limb fell in the backyard, landing about 20 feet from my wife and neighbors. Four days without power. I know this is nothing compared to a tornado, but I can do without it.

 

[_JP_]

We were in the bulls eye. The airfield a mile downwind recorded 82mph gusts, which passed us on the way there. Lots of tree damage, some roofs got it, siding blown off, and light posts damaged, cars wrecked. The neighborhood just plain looks bad. I had to do 5 hours of damage control in the rain right after the wind let up.

 

[Mick]

Right after posting on B&B our power went out again (4th time since the storm).

It is back on once again. Hopefully it stays on this time.

 

[Intrigued]

This is nothing against the OP since I know this term was coined already, but I always think it's so funny when people try to come up with new words, terms, names, etc. for things that don't really need it!! 'Derecho'???? Come on, people------it's a storm. If you need to further clarify, you can add 'high-winds, torrential downpours, lightning, thunderstorm, tornado, hurricane' or anything else. It just sounds so self-important to try to add 'new' words to our language when they are not needed.

I am sorry, call it what you want, but it is not "just a storm". I got caught in one a couple of years ago while driving and high-winds, torrential downpour, thunderstorm, or tornado do not begin to describe it.

When I left work, you could see that a thunderstorm was coming, but only a few large drops of rain were falling, so few that you could easily walk between them. I even thought that I might make it home before the storm. When I started the drive there was still almost no rain (you could have counted the drops). I made it about a half mile before it hit and I mean hit. A wall of wind and rain, like the inside of a car-wash. I couldn't see anything beyond the windshield of my car, except for the tree limbs bouncing off it. I was on a four lane highway with a median and driving totally blind. I couldn't see the road so there was no way to pull off to the side. Because it was a highway, I was afraid to stop. I knew if someone drove up from behind they would plow into me. I knew if someone had stopped ahead of me I would hit them. So, I crept along, clutching the wheel, trying to "feel" the road and chanting, sh*t, sh*t, sh*t, thinking all the while, "I'm going to die today". After forever, or maybe 3 or 4 minutes the storm let up enough so the I could see to pull off to the side of the road and wait it out. After it passed, I pulled back out onto the road and drove home, all the while wondering at how little damage I could see from the storm. There were no trees down that I could see, not even a tree limb. "Humm", I thought, I would of sworn that there would be more damage.

It was not until the next day when I drove back to work that I saw the damage from the Derecho ("straight line winds", is what they called it at the time), that I had driven through the day before. In a band/swath that was only about 3/4 of a mile wide, the damage looked like a tornado (but no, it wasn't a tornado) had hit. Trees were torn up, and torn down. Houses were heavily damaged or destroyed. Two large, old barns, one on each side of the road laid like piles of match sticks on the ground.

 

[gearchow]

Sounds like a storm I experienced in Kuala Lumpur one time. Rain dumped so hard the only thing you could see was the lightening lashing down all around, freeway instant river. Nobody around me seemed to take notice so I pretended also. Scared me to death and I grew up in Maryland and Florida Panhandle. Not much wind in that storm that I remember though.

At least with a hurricane, you got warning and no one to blame but yourself if you get hurt. I've always thought that interior storms are way more nasty in power and suddeness.

-jim

 

[Mick]

At least with a hurricane, you got warning and no one to blame but yourself if you get hurt. I've always thought that interior storms are way more nasty in power and suddeness.

-jim

We were given more than adequate warning (about 12 hours via the local news/weather channel). They did not know what the intensity would be but they did say a severe storm having winds up to 80 mph was approaching. This was when the storm was about 300 miles to the west.

When it got here the noise was almost exactly like a tornado so I told the wife grab your flashlight and follow me to the basement where we stayed until long after it had passed.

I through the main breaker before the power went out as I knew that we were going to lose power with that much wind.

Power has been on for 24 hours now so I think that they have the downed lines that feed our street all repaired.

There is such a high demand on the grid with new areas coming on line and everyone running every appliance they have (fridge, freezer, multiple AC units, etc) that I expect rolling blackouts over the next week or so as more and more customers are brought back online.