Monday - August 15, 2005

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

Where’s Skipper? Right here. Where has he been? Right here. What happened yesterday? Pull up a chair, kiddies and I’ll tell you a tale ....

Saturday morning dawned bright and full of sunshine with clear skies and forecast for another hot day in St. Louis. All that would change drastically before nightfall. I busied myself in the morning posting stuff here and doing ordinary housecleaning chores. About 1:00 that afternoon, I decided to knock off and enjoy a little R&R. I popped open a beer, settled into my recliner (of “pinkness” fame) and plopped in a DVD. I had just received the Johnny Weissmuller ”Tarzan Classics” collection from Amazon and was eager to go back in time to a day when movies were fun.

I made it through the first movie (of six), “Tarzan The Ape Man” and was starting to get drowsy (after only the third beer? what a lightweight!). It was then that I noticed things had gotten pretty durned quiet outside. The crickets, cicadas and birds were silent and traffic on the street otuside was almost non-existent. I launched myself out of Ye Olde Pinkness and threw open the front door to get some fresh air and see if the world had ended and everyone forgot to tell me.

I wish I hadn’t.

Remember the scene in “Ghostbusters” where the powers of darkness under the control of Zool descended on New York? The sky got real bloody nasty like a cauldron of boiling oil and lightning flashes mixed in to add a little spice to the display. No sooner had I uttered the words, “OH, SHIT!”, than the aforementioned fecal matter hit the ventilator. I barely slammed the door in time before the first winds hit, rocking the apartment. Now, I’ve experienced 70 mph winds before (and even twice that strong during the occasional hurricane down on the Gulf Coast, where I’m originally from) but this crap slammed into the city of St. Louis like a runaway train doing ninety-to-nothing on a track straight to hell. Here’s what KMOX had to say ....

Winds clocked at 70 mph

(KMOX - August 13, 2005)—The heat wave has broken. . .but so have tree limbs. . .and entire trees. . .in a severe thunderstorm that swept through Saturday afternoon. Winds were clocked at up to 70 miles per hour. Temperatures dropped 20-degrees. Even large trees came down and highway crews are on overtime to get the roads reopened.

The storm has left road accidents in its wake. A tractor-trailer was jackknifed on westbound Interstate 44 at Big Bend. Another tractor-trailer ran off the road on Eastbound 70 in St. Charles and flash flooding blocked even some major interstates. Ameren-UE reports tens of thousands of customers lost power in the storm and have emergency crews working around the clock to restore service.

The good news. . .a second line of storms behind the first, broke up before it could do damage. The first round, though, was enough. It’s left damage it will take days to repair.

Me? I was trying to find a place to hide in my apartment as lightning crashed down from the angry, poltergeist-infected sky crackling into trees all around my apartment. Some strikes as close as twenty feet from my front door. I’m talking blinding flash of light and when my vision clears there is a smoking stump, split in mulitple pieces within spitting distance of my tired old butt. After the third close strike (I could REALLY smell the ozone by then) my bowels and bladder started sending warning signals that perhaps the basement bathroom would be the best place to conduct further business that afternoon. I readily agreed and made a dash for the stairs. About that time (somebody cue up Pat Travers) .... BOOM! BOOM! OUT GO THE LIGHTS! .... KMOX had the report on Sunday ....

Full post-storm power may not be back til Tuesday

(KMOX - August 14, 2005) --Slowly but surely the power is coming back on in and around St. Louis. Saturday’s 70-mile-per-hour thunderstorm left close to a half-million St. Louisans in the dark. With word it may be Tuesday before all power is restored, hundreds of families have been checking into hotels rather than spend the night without light. Florissant has opened its civic center for any resident without power who would like to stay there. And, all over the area, the sound of chainsaws is likely to be with us for several days. Some smaller roads remain closed by downed trees and wires. Amazingly, no injuries are reported following what was one of the heaviest storms in years.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I spent Saturday night in the dark, sweating my buns off as the heat and humidity invaded my previously air-conditioned abode. About midnight Saturday, the worst of the storm had passed and I started to worry about the regfrigator and how certain items might spoil if left inside. Yep, you guessed it. I decided the rest of that beer was too important to let it go bad on me. Besides, I figured it might help me sleep through a night without cool air. It worked very well, I’m proud to say.

I awoke about 10:00am Sunday, still with no power but snoring peacefully on the spare bed in the guest bedroom down in the cellar. There is only a small window, high up on the wall down there and I couldn’t see out too well (my vision was slightly blurred, probably due to some of that beer going bad on me before I had a chance to drink it). I stumbled up the stairs and threw open the kitchen door to see .... rain. Oh yeah, and smashed trees in every direction. My first thought was “Cool!”. My second thought was, “where’s the Excedrin?”

I sweltered in the heat until about 3:00 Sunday afternoon when it became unbearable so I took a cold shower (cold? that’s a joke!) and went for a drive in the Jeep (which had air-conditioning, making it my best friend at the moment). I rode all over town surveying the damage and staying out of the way of police, fire and emergency vehicles that were flying all over the place willy-nilly in pursuit of idiots playing with downed power lines. By the time I got back to my apartment around 5:00pm, power had been restored to our subdivision and A/C was already fighting to drain the humidity and heat from Chez Kelly.

I hope you all had a more pleasant weekend and if you live in the St. Louis area .... I feel your pain. When I left for work this morning, power was still on but cable had not been restored yet. You know what that means .. I have no internet access at home and no cable news. That’s probably a good thing. I’ll be posting here from this .... ahem .... internet cafe (since I would never post from work) during the day but Frank is going to have to help me keep you entertained for a few days. Until then, be aware that this Mother Of All Summer Storms is heading for the East Coast. You have been warned ....

Posted by The Skipper     on 08/15/2005 at 08:37 AM   
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather • Personal •  
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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