I just read that there are windows blown out of office buildings in Houston, and 900,000 are without power. Links to Twitter vid of damaged office buildings: Link1 Link2 Must have been one heckuva storm.
Over a million w/o power (including us) and this is why. This was the worst non-hurricane weather "event" we have ever seen. Winds reported up to 115 MPH. Lots of trees and fences down. We had no damage but our neighbors do. I'm moving stuff from the kitchen freezer to the garage where hubby's new truck is powering the big freezer.
Not that I actually 'liked' your post. Do they have a way to repair or estimate when you can get back on line with alternate routing?
That is NOT gonna get fixed overnight. Holy poop. The line for generator installations just got longer...
This is the glitch in prepping. No alternate electric in summer--lose all your frozen food. In winter, home canned food jars can break. And solar and wind can go only so far.
That is kind of what we had on May 8, 2009. They called it a Super Derecho; thunderstorms with destructive winds of excess up to120 miles an hour. It was scary. We did not have power for a week!! We had a small gas generator that we used to keep our freezer and refrigerator going. Then we would briefly unplug it to plug in to other things for a short time, water heater so we could take a hot shower, charge our phones, check the internet, and so on. We ate cold cereal, sandwiches, and used our charcoal grill most days. Luckily, we had filled our gas cans up early in the week because all the stores and gas stations were closed because of power outages. Power lines down everywhere. We lost 3 very large trees in our yard and roof shingles off our house and out buildings. It was a mess everywhere!
No idea. From what I can tell, the number of outages is down from over a million to just under 800,000 so they are working on "redundancy" options. At least we have water and it is cool and cloudy today (in the 70's). Humidity is 90%, though. Tomorrow supposed to be near 90.
I have never heard that term; they haven't called it such but who knows. It's a mess for a storm that only lasted about 20 minutes! Apparently it was moving through at over 80 MPH.
I don't know...It is supposedly a new class of a storm. Lots of articles about it. https://www.theweathernetwork.com/e...-history-may-8-2009-the-super-derecho-of-2009
It is a 'new type of storm' straight line. We had a term here referring to a train when the line of storm kept coming and raining hard in the area. The storm was moving but the rain stayed in this diagonal, say blowing south to north keeping it on a small area instead of west to east, which is normal. So the wind and rain kept happening in a narrow swath for quite a while. I think we used to call that raining buckets. But that was before climate change.
I first heard "El Derecho" not long after I moved here in 2010 when they ripped through this region. As @Mary Stetler said, it's a straight line of strong winds (I wanna say "wind sheer") that takes down lots of trees. "Derecho" s Spanish for "right" (as opposed to "left.") I forget why they call the storms Derecho.
In the news on Twitter, they are all showing pictures and saying that Houston got hit with a tornado yesterday. So, it sounds like it was more than just a hard storm. Have you heard that it was a tornado, @Beth Gallagher ?
There were reported tornadoes in the Houston area, but the brunt of the damage was done by the "straight line" winds of over 100 MPH.
Here is a video showing some of the storm in Texas. At 630 PM, the sky looks totally dark when they show the television stations cameras of Houston!