During a heatwave here in the UK earlier this year I was travelling down south. But for 10 minutes out of nowhere we got literal apocalyptic levels of halistones. It sounded like they were going to pierce through the roof of my car. It became hard to see and loads of people actually ended up pulling over just in case. Then it just ended as quickly as it started and 5 minutes later it was so hot again that there was no trace of any water anywhere.

This actually happened again a week or two later, but I was at home so it wasn’t as crazy feeling as it was whilst driving.

Where I’m from, we’re having volcanic ash right now.

Is that not what house insurance is for?

Well I’ve got three answers to that.

The most severe weather I sheltered in place from was hurricane Fran. Fortunately it didn’t rearrange my family’s own chunk of the forest too bad but some trees were thrown on a few houses.

The most severe weather I’ve experienced unsheltered was Hurricane Noel. The dumbfuck 20 year old I used to be decided to ride a motorcycle from Daytona to West Palm Beach for no particular reason. I got my giblets rinsed. That wasn’t the most unpleasant weather I’ve ever been in though, I rode that same motorcycle through a freezing rain storm about 3 years later. I kept having to pound my fist into my visor to de-ice it.

The worst aftermath of weather I’ve seen but wasn’t personally in was an EF-3 tornado. It was on the ground for over an hour, it cut a path a thousand feet wide and easily 50 miles long, tearing through forest, neighborhoods and commercial districts. I worked as a flight instructor at a nearby airport, so afterward I got a fairly good look at the damage path from the air. It looked kind of like a logging operation, you know how they’ll take a parcel of land and clear cut it either for development or for the timber? Except smeared across the landscape crossing roads and taking houses and buildings with the trees.

The top two:

• Hurricane Fran, which actually made landfall 30 years ago today. Our house at the time was about 120 miles (200 km) inland, but the storm was moving fast and still had a lot of power even that far in. Combined with the ground already being saturated with days of rain before the storm, the state lost millions of trees. We had my grandmother come stay with us because she had a large tree right next to her house. We lost power that night around 9:30 or 10. Maybe around 2 or 3 AM things started getting really bad. At some point my dad thought he heard a different sound in the wind and we all got in an interior closet on the ground floor. Eventually it sounded better but I didn’t go back to sleep until daylight. Our house didn’t have any damage but there was a thick line of trees in the woods behind our house that were all knocked down, kind of spiraling along the line. Never got the weather service to verify if that was a tornado because there was so much damage everywhere. Surprisingly my grandmother’s house was fine and she had electricity back the day after the storm, so we all went to stay with her except for my dad, who kept staying at our house to keep an eye on it. It took us a week to get power back at our house.
• When I was 5 an F4 tornado came about a mile from our house. It actually crossed my cousin’s street a quarter mile from their house. Other than a young tree that was permanently bent sideways our house was fine, but 4 people were killed. We used to drive down a street where a couple people died pretty regularly, but once my parents realized it was scaring me they had to take a longer route. All that was left there were foundations and staircases. If a house doesn’t have a basement, the closet under the stairs is my next choice for tornado shelter.

Was in a tornado that tore the roof up and collapsed the building I was in. It’s a miracle I survived. If I wouldn’t have dove into the doorway the walls would have crushed me.

It does, in fact, sound exactly like a train barreling through your living room.

Hurricane with 2 week blackout following it.

Tornado but it was a block away - the sky was GREEN. I looked out the window and thought “that’s odd” then my brother called and said there is a tornado by you go take the kids to an interior room (hallway was best we could do). It knocked down a checkers and a car dealership, tossed cars around.

Hurricane.

Winds were so strong I could hear the house creaking as it was passing over. Stripped the shingles off my roof to where it was raining in the bedrooms. Ceilings collapsed because the insulation and drywall became waterlogged. I got hit on the head from that because I was trying to pull stuff out of the master bedroom before everything got waterlogged. Fortunately, drywall was soft enough where it didn’t cause a concussion. Tree fell on my home. Another lucky break because it was only leaning on it and didn’t cause any structural damage.

Next day rode around on my bike to see the extent of the damage. Shingles everywhere. Some with the roofing nails still attached, and some were embedded into the siding of various homes. All wooden privacy fences knocked down, destroyed. A few of the slats were broken up to the point where they looked like crude wooden spears. A bunch of duplexes had their fire alarms constantly beeping. Not because there was a fire, but because they were running on battery power instead of mains power (really stupid design).

Saw one home were it was a two story but became a one story. Roof completely collapsed in. 2nd floor walls mostly gone. Inside I could see a tangled mess of the family’s furniture and the wooden support structure.

For the 2nd worse home I saw, the wind had pushed in where the garage door used to be and ripped off the roof from the inside. About 2/3rds of the trust structure was exposed to the elements. That one hit me in the feels because I had just met that family the week before.

Venturing out further, most of the power poles were knocked and the power lines and transformers were laying in the streets. All the stop lights were dead, obviously from the lack of power. Most survived the winds though. Most of the trees, if there weren’t knocked over, had their leaves stripped off. Stop signs, they were gone. The wind shook them back and forth so much that the metal became fatigued and snapped them off by the base. Saw the same thing with a tractor trailer. Looked like Godzilla snapped it in half, all from the wind and metal fatigue.

Over the next couple of days, it was a constant wailing of ambulances. They were evacuating patients out of the hospitals.

That was definitely an experience, living in a half destroyed home for a year rebuilding and dealing with an insurance company that was ill equipped to handle the influx of claims.

Flash flood on the freeway back from Vegas. It was raining so hard we had to yell over it, then a semi passed us, dumped a waterfall on the windshield and the car in fronts tail lights stretched so far vertically we couldn’t gauge distance anymore and pulled over.

In my infinite wisdom after a week of filandering in the desert I elected to “experience the storm,” I got out, raised my arms, and felt every hair on my body stand up.

Scurried back in before my appointment with God.

My story is more tame compared to the others listed, but still a wild 15 minutes for me.

I was walking from my house to a friend’s on a warm April day. As I left my house I saw some rain clouds but figured it was a quick 15 minute walk and I’d be fine, no need for an umbrella.

The first five minutes of my walk, the clouds quickly changed, shit, rain was coming. Sure enough, downpour. Buckets of water coming out of the sky.

Then it paused, for a moment, only for it to start hailing. Bright sun but hail dropping from the sky.

Then nothing. Clear skys, bright sun, a beautiful April day. I picked the exact wrong 15 minutes to go outside.

I see I’ve got a fellow Hurricane Floyd survivor here. Here’s my story:

I was living in eastern NC at the time. What I remember is they expected the storm to pass through during the night. So we hunkered down, went to bed, I remember waking up a couple times during the night and hearing the wind but I didn’t get up to look.

In the morning I stepped outside and discovered that I couldn’t go anywhere. My apartment was at the top of an incline near a creek and most of what was below us was underwater. So many of my neighbors lost their homes, their cars…the streets were flooded. It was like living on an island. We had no power so I cooked with a little propane camping grill. I remember power being out for a couple days. Only once the power came back on did we realize the full extent of the damage. I vividly remember aerial footage of dead livestock floating in floodwaters.

I worked at a small music store at the time and it got completely gutted. Flood water came in the back entrance, went out the front entrance, and carried almost all our gear away with it. We had to reconstruct the entire interior of the building and purchase all new inventory. We weren’t able to open for business for almost two weeks.

Funny story about that: A few weeks later a guy came in carrying a power amp he said he found about a quarter mile away alongside the highway. He assumed it was ours. We checked the serial number and it was in fact ours, but by that time we had already received insurance and emergency funds and were able to write off almost all the lost inventory. So we said he could keep it. Couple weeks later he came back, said he disassembled it, let it all air dry for a couple days, reassembled it, and it worked fine. Dude scored a $700 power amp for free.

Cats and dogs

I mean I live in Nebraska so outside of tornados, hail, downpours, thunder-snow, 90 mph wind gusts, and extreme temperature changes over 24 hours ive seen mostly everything nature can throw at us.

I guess the weirdest was this one. In Nebraska weather at least during heavy thunderstorms comes from west and travels east. Sometimes from the south and sometimes north but never from the east.

This one came from the west, went east. Stopped, went back west with no precip and sat there building for a couple of hours. When it finally pushed east again. It was one of the hardest rainfalls I’ve ever seen

In 2022 we had “calima” in southern Spain. It happens when wind blows in sand from Sahara and is quite common but this one was insane. I only have one shitty picture of it:

There’s no filter here and it’s in the middle of the day. This is what everything looked like. This is what it normally looks like:

It was as if the whole world got an instant sepia filter. When you were walking outside you could fell the sand in your eyes. Everything got covered in a thin layer of red sand. They had to pressure wash the whole region:

I’ve experienced a tropical storm in Florida, a total whiteout blizzard in Minnesota while in a vehicle, and minus 40F in Alaska.