It was actually a small tornado. The sky had turned so foreboding that
I thought something really ugly was coming so I ran into the house to
warn my daughter who was standing in the kitchen looking out the window
to the golf course behind our house. As I got into the kitchen there
arose an enormous, deafening clatter which I later figured out was a
monstrous rain of hail clattering on the tile roof and the rain gutters.
Simultaneously, the wind picked up and blew the rain through the
screens of the pool enclosure which created a fog so thick that you
couldn't see to the other side of the pool (and to what was happening on
the golf course.
At that point I remembered that I hadn't put the garage door down so ran
back to the garage. When I opened the garage door and stepped down I
stepped on a pile of hail and nearly fell onto the floor. More than
half the garage floor was covered by a thick layer of hemispherical hail
stones about 1" (25mm) in diameter. All of that happened in probably a
minute or two at most. When the rain and the wind stopped we could see
that a huge ficus tree had been pulled out of the ground about 75 yards
away and numerous other trees were down in a pretty much straight line
trail heading across the golf course to the northeast.
That was about the scariest weather event that happened during the 10
years we lived there except for the night long vigil of Hurricane
Andrew. That's another event I'll never forget. Fortunately we were
about 30 miles north of the eye and I had our house well protected. It
received very little damage apart from the screened pool enclosure.
Even that wasn't very bad.
Chuck Norcutt
On 7/1/2012 11:55 AM, Chris Barker wrote:
> Wow, pretty spectacular . . .
>
> Chris
>
> On 1 Jul 2012, at 15:15, Chuck Norcutt wrote:
>
>> Since I'm only in Florida in the winter these days I miss the summertime
>> lightning displays I used to see in the 80s and 90s. I used to be able
>> to sit in the garage with the door open and watch the thunderstorms as
>> they rolled toward the ocean from the 'glades in late afternoon. I
>> especially remember one that filled the front half of the garage with
>> about 3" of hail one day. :-)
>
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