We were expecting another line of storms last night, and canceled plans accordingly. Just like the last storm on the 26th, the sirens went off, twice. And just like then, we simply stayed inside. After all, it's the easiest place to watch the radar weather image on a laptop, disconnected from a power cord because we don't fully trust surge protectors, and with a picture large enough to be clear.
So of course, it "broke". Not the laptop, the radar image.
It had been a fast moving vertical bar of red on the screen, and then just sat, about 10 miles away, just on the other side of the freeway. That's when Steve's eldest son called about the tornado. The front wave of wind, rain, and lightning had hit us while the radar image still sat unmoving on the screen. It was time to turn on the TV to the local news, even though it was plugged in. (They are much cheaper to replace if necessary.)
Weather was all the news. The metro's storm was clearing on the west side, as it was a very narrow east-west band, even though vertically it covered most of the state. Across the bottom of the screen was the endless scroll of counties where people still needed to take shelter, and above that a bigger bar for the counties getting the tornado warning. Not watch, warning. We were included.
Oh yeah, their radar showed us in the heart of the weather, just like our windows did. My laptop, not so much. Still a frozen radar image. But we weren't getting the hail the newscaster was warning about, the wind hadn't been as strong, and the tornado warning, while still including our county in it on the screen, was being explained by the announcer as "radar indicated", backing down from "spotted by law enforcement", and had been from the county to the west of the northern tip of our county, and moving to the northeast from there. (We're in the southern part, so never in danger.) Just in case, they diagrammed where it might be in the next 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and on into Wisconsin, if it should ramp up again.
My laptop radar image still just sat, so some part of the system got taken out by the storm's leading edge. Our rain level backed down but continued to fall for about an hour. By then it was dark, I was tired, and bedtime loomed. Tomorrow (now today) we'd be out and about to see what damage may have occurred, though the previous storm days earlier had done very little here that we could see, aside from bringing a single tree down just outside our park.
It had been stronger than this one, though with no rotation claimed anywhere, but winds had been clocked at 80 mph in the metro, and two days of news had been showing downed trees and reporting the slow progress of restoring power in the area. The only "damage" from it in our yard was the nuisance value of it having restored life to all the little uprooted weeds in the round raised flower garden after they'd sat, roots in the air, for several days. Guess this time I'll have to actually remove them!
Dang!
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