Rants from the Hollow

When I last blogged about the weather, on August 15, I thought it was done for the year. Less than 2 weeks later, the entire East Coast shut down while Hurricane Irene scraped the continent from Outer Banks to Labrador. The ground was already saturated after several heavy August storms, and the Weather Service warned about the danger of significant flooding.  Our part of Fairfax County had some significant rains, but was spared the worst of it. We lost the butterfly bush, and thousands of homes lost power.

Although Irene made a big impression on New Jersey, and practically floated Vermont off the map, causing billions in damage, it was widely regarded as something of a disappointment, not living up to the television hype.

On September 8, Tropical Storm Lee became Northern Virginia’s 500  year flood. Lacking hurricane force winds, the storm sucked huge amounts of water out of the Atlantic Ocean, and then sat on top of eastern North America, causing flooding from Louisiana all the way along the Appalachian watershed into upstate New York.

 With up to 10 inches of rain falling on top of what was already very wet ground, the storm created unprecedented levels of flooding.  Cars were ruined when a commuter lot in Reston flooded.  Although we’re used to Difficult Run flooding over Hunter Mill Road, this was the first time the water rose so high that the stables at Angelica Run Farm had to evacuate the horses.  Moved to a nearby paddock by a group of volunteers, they eventually ended up cooling their hooves at Frying Pan Park.  Tragically, a 12 year boy was swept away by the floods in Vienna, and drowned along Lawyers Road. At least 2 adults were drowned in the area, also.

I sat out most of Lee in Ohio. Other than the disconcerting feeling of seeing the clouds blowing from the East, the storm didn’t even fill up the pond. The Hollow ended up with about an inch of rain, on top of all the other rain we’ve had this year. I was in Virginia for the Aug 23 5.8 magnitude earthquake. While not a weather-related event, it was still an impressive display of nature, causing my chair and desk to shake for about 3/4 of a minute.  Tinkling noises came from all over the house, with the occasional sound of something dropping, and a sort of low rumbling noise underneath it all. With an epicenter about 80 miles to the south, it didn’t cause any apparent damage in our neighborhood, although a wall collapsed nearby in Tysons, some of the stores in the mall had to close for several days, and the Washington Monument, suffered some damage, and 6 weeks later, is still closed.  The National Cathedral also sustained earthquake damage and will be closed at least until late November, and it is trying to raise $25 million for repairs. An aftershock woke me up in the middle of the night several days later, and they are still continuing, but at around 2.5 on the Richter scale are too weak to be felt here.

Several nearby bridges have only recently reopened, and as Lee cleanup and earthquake repairs continue, we’re in the middle of the nicest weekend of weather that Vienna has seen since June, which is the last time it was simultaneously sunny and under 80 degrees. The news reported on Thursday that this was the first back to back pair of sunny days since the first week of August, and we’ve had 2 more.  With a high of 73, I went for a short bike ride, and did some gardening.  The soil in NoVA is still very moist, but at least it isn’t too wet to be worked. Elizabeth is at the Hollow and reports standing puddles of water around the cabin, and the builders say that all that mud is slowing them down.

Last February, I started this post about weather extremes.  I planned on finishing as soon as the weather settled down.  Six months later, I’m still waiting.

Living in England for so long, we found that if anything, the English tend to be especially preoccupied about the weather, which does have a tendency to change without warning in England.  When asked by the English how I like their weather, I used to to reply that I like English weather better than American weather, because it lacked the uncomfortable extremes.  This was usually not an acceptable answer, apparently being received as yet another example of American braggadocio. Totally disregarding my social need for climactic parity, 18 months after our return to the US, the weather continues to be a lot harsher than I remember from my first 40 years here.

Narrowly missing December 2009 snowstorms in England and Virginia, last season’s harsh weather finally caught up to me in Ohio, with a storm compared to the epic blizzards of the late 70s giving me and the Subaru a refresher course in snow driving. The first half of Virginia’s record snowfall started during my return drive on Jan 30. It started snowing during the day on Friday, 5 February 2010, and didn’t stop until Saturday night. The fourth largest snowfall on record for DC (as measured at the airport), everyone in Vienna/Reston feels that this was a bigger snow than the ’96 storm. We had about 28 inches here, which brought motorized life to a near standstill.

Unprecedented snowfall was followed by an unusually warm and short spring. After at least 2 weeks without any frost, I decided to plant my first set of tomatoes 2 weeks early. They did fine, and the frost didn’t return until November, making for about an 8 month growing season. Although there were periods of heavy rain, precipitation was on the low side for the year, and the long hot summer meant that neither green beans nor limas produced any fruit until September.

The entire eastern half of the country experienced extremely violent weather during the summer, with tornado-producing fronts working their way across the continent over a period of days.  We never saw any tornadoes, although we had a number of violent little storms, and I was close to a tornado in Chatauqua, NY (3 blog posts from last July with storm videos).

2011 did not see any DC area records for snowfall, but we did have one memorably harsh snowstorm that snarled traffic for hours, and stranded many people overnight.   Dropping bad snow on top of worse, it hit just before rush hour, creating impossible driving conditions in much of the DC area, which many police and bus drivers were quoted as saying were the worst that they’d ever seen. The heavier snows the previous years had not resulted in as many power outages (650,000) nor had they resulted in 8 hour commuting times.

The blizzard of late January 2011 did result in record snow falls for NYC. They were still shoveling the place out when Elizabeth and I arrived a couple days later to celebrate our anniversary. We’d already spent a very cold January day in Ohio, meeting Sam the builder, Sheldon the excavator, and several other interested parties as we decided exactly where to put the cabin.  This was followed by a miserably rainy day in February while I followed the surveyors around the northern and eastern boundary of our property.  Both of those trips were punctuated by memorably snowy evenings in the Millersburg Comfort Inn, watching the pickup trucks sliding around SR 83.

After last year’s early and short spring, I started my vegetable garden on March 1, and planted my tomatoes and squash early.  The spring garden had a bumper crop of peas, spinach and lettuce, the last of which was pretty much gone by June.  Meanwhile, the country was experiencing its worst ever outbreak of tornadoes from April 25-28.  I watched the Weather Channel in morbid fascination as a deadly tornado raked across the northern side of Birmingham, Alabama. Heroic work by the National Weather Service and local media meant sufficient warning so that the highest ever level of tornado damage was not accompanied by the highest level of tornado fatalities.

Besides all that, it rained. A lot.  Parts of the Mississippi and Missouri river basins saw the worst flooding in almost 80 years, and the Corps of Engineers was forced to deliberately flood some communities to save others. We had hoped to start construction of our Ohio cabin in March, but heavy rains in the central part of the state delayed our start. Photo club friend Tom Shevock and I went on a photoshoot on March 3 along the Potomac Valley.  After a couple hours of pouring rain, we had lunch in Brunswick, MD and called it quits.  It turned out to be the rainiest day in 44 years of record-keeping at nearby Dulles Airport.

In May, it was recognized in Ohio as the worst farming season in over 50 years, and it has continued to rain since then. Although none of the individual floods have approached the violence of the July 4th 1969 flood, Elizabeth has seen the Killbuck over its banks during several spring trips back to Ohio.

July set heat records across large swaths of the USA. Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and previously battered and now fried Arkansas all experienced record high temperatures and set multiple records for highest highs, highest lows, and highest consecutive temperatures.  Northern, VA had what was probably the hottest July ever recorded, and an all time record high of 105 was set at Dulles Airport.  Spending 3 weeks in Ohio, where it was merely well above average, I missed the worst of the heat, but Kirk and Elizabeth reported that the A/C seemed to be struggling.

Although many parts of the country have had noteworthy levels of rain, other parts are suffering unprecedented levels of drought. The US Drought Monitor shows virtually all of Texas and large parts of the south as experiencing extreme to exceptional levels of drought, while a swath from Ohio through Kentucky and Tennessee shows as a drought free area between two abnormally dry areas (what the map does not show is how abnormally wet Ohio has been).  Although we continue to have heavy showers in Northern, VA, it isn’t enough water, especially in all this heat, to keep us from away from the edge of a moderate drought.

The good thing about the weather is that there is always something to talk about.

Big Max pumpkin, 62 pounds.

Saturday July 24, several waves of severe storm crossed Lake Chautauqua.  At 5pm, a tornado warning was announced. The view from this dock in Jamestown, at the southern end of the lake, was impressive. A huge wall cloud, miles across, blew across the sky to the north.

The picture of the wall cloud below is a panorama, stitched together from 9 frames that I took handheld with my Canon G9. If you click on it, you’ll get a much larger image (hint–click on that image to see it full size–you’ll need to scroll back and forth).  My guess is that the nasty gray knot at the far right is whatever is left of the F2 tornado that crossed the north end of the lake, touching down 10 minutes earlier, 15 miles beyond the sail boat in the far left.  Somewhere in this wall cloud is the remnant of that twister.

From our vantage point on the dock, we had a perfect view of the squall line, watching the wind, rain, and white caps approach from 5 miles away. It hit hard, with strong winds and heavy rain.

A local television station has some impressive video footage of the actual tornado and map from the National Weather Service.

Here’s a statement from the National Weather Service with more details.

Edited video by Jim Grimaldi on YouTube showing the tornado and some of the damage.

If you can’t view my video, here’s a version in Shockwave.

Driving down Whites Ferry Road on the Maryland side of the ferry, it was clear to us that this was an exceptional storm, which had made a huge amount of damage. We carefully picked our way from side to side of the street to avoid fallen limbs and trees. One large branch fell down in front of us.

Our original plan was to head west towards 15 to look for a place to eat in Frederick, but all the roads were blocked by fallen trees.

We tried 2 different roads towards the west, but couldn’t get through.  We saw a transformer explode.  Finally, we reached a point where Whites Ferry road was blocked, too, so we decided to cut our losses and head back across the ferry.

The Potomac was calm again, but covered with floating leaves and branches. We chatted with some of the other people on the ferry and learned that River Road was partially blocked, but probably still open.

I was concerned that we’d be stuck on the other side of the river. Although there were some trees down, which slowed traffic, the road was open. The traffic light at route 15 was out, but we waited it out, and finally ended up in Leesburg for a late lunch, about an hour and a half after the storm came through.

[an alternative version of the River Road video in Shockwave.]

Kirk had never been to White’s Ferry, so last Sunday, I thought he’d enjoy the short trip across the Potomac on the Jubal Early. I knew that some storms were blowing through, and I’d been watching their progress on my iPhone, I’d lived through a squall and tornado warnings the day before at Chautauqua Lake, but I was still surprised by the ferocity of this thing.

It was very calm when we pulled onto the Jubal Early ferry. The Potomac was almost mirror calm.

The imminent arrival of a storm was clear to anyone looking up and seeing the gust front.  Within a minute or two, all hell had broken loose. The wind hit hard and fast.  Overhead, everything was churning, with sycamore trees writhing in the gale and countless bits of leaf, stick, and stuff not just blowing through the air, but churning in it.  The wind seemed to be blowing every which way at once.

The ferry, which is tied to both banks by heavy steel cables, stayed fairly stable, but the cars were buffeted by the wind. The waves in the Potomac were breaking over the side of the ferry.  A stack of red canoes that had been neatly piled along the bank had been blown all over the place (probably hitting some of the cars waiting to cross from Maryland to Virginia.

Although it continued to rain and blow for awhile, the heaviest winds were gone by the time Kirk drove us off the ferry on the Maryland side.  As you can tell from the video, we were mightily impressed by both the suddenness and the violence of the thing. It would turn out that the storm damage was much worse than we expected.  Sitting in the car in the middle of the river, we had ringside seats when the squall blew through, but it still didn’t prepare us for what we would encounter next.

(If the above video didn’t work, or if it shut off before we completed the crossing, a Shockwave version is available here.)