So Much Weather, All at Once

Amazing storm blew in out of Texas Monday. (Damn you Texas!) The forecast had called for rain, but when I stepped outside at around 10 a.m. it was so dark I had to turn on the porch light. Across the river, Tori was in her classroom and saw the sky turn green. The school told them there were tornado warnings, so keep the kids away from the windows. The kids, of course, immediately freaked out, and every time there was a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder they all screamed.

There was a LOT of lightning and thunder, and the wind swept in with a fury. This is how strong it was – the wind blew a train off a trestle! I'm not kidding, check out the video here. I would have bet that wasn't possible, but looking at the video, I get it. All those box cars made a big sail for the wind barreling down the river, and as they went over, they took the locomotive with them.

That's the train trestle that's part of the Huey P. Long Bridge over the Mississippi, the same bridge Tori crosses twice a day to and from work. When she headed home, the four-lane roadway was reduced to one lane because of all the emergency vehicles.

In our neighborhood, we got a lot of wind and rain, but the power stayed on, at least here. But it wasn't all sweetness and light. Right around the corner a power pole blew completely over. A swath of houses and stores a couple of blocks wide and almost a mile long were blacked out south of the downed line. This is why I'm glad I'm a northerner. We were fine. When I drove by the morning to take the kids to school, the pole was still lying across the road.

See, this is what happens when you build a housing development on what used to be a swamp. Sure, you can put in a bunch of fill, and you can put in a drainage system, but when you get that much rain that fast, some of the stuff you stuck in the ground doesn't stay.

We've been waiting for more today, but apparently it's mostly move on east. (Sorry Florida.)

But boy, it can change fast, can't it? It's not that we have different weather than we had back in Oregon. It's just that we've got so much weather. Often all at once.

A Terrible Tropical Storm

By terrible storm, I mean if this was supposed to be a storm, it did a terrible job of it. We woke up this morning and the sky was blue, the sun streaming down, light breeze and birds chirping. If this is a storm, I'll take more please.

We've been watching the approach of Tropical Storm Karen for several days, with warnings and alerts and predictions of where it would make landfall. It's late in the season, and Louisiana has not been hit by a hurricane after Oct. 1 since 1898, and as the last days of September flicked by, I was feeling better and better. But you have to keep alert. And you can certainly understand why people here would be nervous about a storm starting with the letter K. So when Tropical Storm Karen formed up in the southern Gulf of Mexico, we went on heightened alert.

We checked our supplies, cleaned up a few things in the yard, and waited. At first the predictions were that it would veer east and make landfall somewhere along the Florida panhandle, but as the weekend approached it seemed to be holding steady for the mouth of the Mississippi.

But it was doing some odd things. All the activity seemed to be to the east of the "center" of the storm. A cold front moving across Texas seemed to be pushing dry wind in from the west. All day Saturday Karen seemed to be stalled just south of Grand Isle on the Mississippi delta.

And then about 10 last night, it just disappeared. I've been watching hurricanes with a personal interest since 2008 and I've never seen anything like this. On the TV weather report, the radar showed a big blob, big blob, big blob, and then practically nothing. It just sort of disappeared.

This morning the weather map showed a clear gulf, with just the letter L indicating some lingering low pressure.

All spring we'd been reading predictions about what a difficult hurricane season this was likely to be. All the signs were there for one cataclysm after another. The reality has been very different. Here in Louisiana we've had a couple of systems start to spin up in the gulf, then sort of peter out and turn inland over Mexico or Texas, drop some rain and die. In the Caribbean, there have been a few near misses to the V.I. as storms steamed across the Atlantic, then veered sharply north and died out at sea. I could be mistaken – I know, it's shocking, but I could – but I don't think a single storm has caused any trouble for the U.S. Atlantic coast.

And it's crazy, because ocean surface temperatures are still high, there's plenty of energy out there. I was talking to one weather watcher on St Croix last week who said September was actually warmer than August, and there's still concern that with the high temps the season could linger on into December.

But from where I'm sitting, it seems like an unusually quiet hurricane season is all but in the books. Still, we won't break into our supplies until Dec. 1. Because you never know, except sometimes you do.

It's That Time of Year

I'm really not an asshole. Really. I'm actually considered a very nice guy, sympathetic, caring.

But this is the time of year when I particularly enjoy having made the move to St. Croix.

When I'm in the car, listening to the radio, and someone from Oklahoma City says the snow is already up to her knees, I chuckle. When I hear that Chicago (where I was born and lived my first 10 years of life) is bracing for one of the 10 worst snowstorms in its history, I get a warm glow inside. I hear from our friend Larry in Nashville (where I lived five years) that he's expecting snow again there, I commiserate, but I can't help smiling. And when I check the weather in Oregon (where I lived more than 20 years) and see that the temp is 47 and might make it all the way up to 50 today, and it's raining (as if a cold rain in Oregon in February is news – a cold rain in Oregon in February was what made us decide to move here) I feel a deep, deep sense of satisfaction.

Granted, I don't get much kick out of the news from Los Angeles (lived in SoCal 10 years,) where the temp will be in the mid-60s again today. I've got to check the news about freeway traffic and earthquake predictions to get the same smug, self-righteous, innsufferable satisfaction, as if I'm somehow responsible for the weather here.

Right now, at 8:40 a.m., the temp on St. Croix is 77, and is expected to be about 84 by midafternoon. It's always about 84 by midafternoon. There's not a cloud in the blue, blue sky. Tonight's low is forecast at 72, which is a little chilly for these parts.

Sorry – I really, really am not an asshole. Making those comparisons is sort of the point. Yes, there are problems and occasional challenges to living here, but none of them have to do with snowstorms. I promise to write about one of them really soon, if that'll make you feel better.

Or wait until August and September. You can all get back to me while I'm sweating out another hurricane season. Except in parts of the U.S. you'll be sweltering in 100 + heat, and the headlines wll be about heatwaves, and here it'll be about 84 by midafternoon. I'll take that.