In this part of the country, “isolated thunderstorms” is weather-speak for “you’ll get rain approximately at the same time the devil goes ice skating in Hades.” Except for tonight, when our neighborhood found itself squarely in the cross hairs of one of those isolated incidents. We got a nice rain, which was greatly appreciated since it’s been a month since we’ve had any.
Unfortunately, that rain came with a price – very high, gusty winds. Our fully loaded pomegranate tree is loose in the ground, and would have been completely uprooted had I not staked it down a couple of months ago. But our neighbors to the immediate east suffered a significant loss, namely:
One of the trunks of their 30′ red oak tree was snapped by the gusty winds. You have to live in a tree-challenged region like ours to understand what a tragedy this is. Fortunately, the tree was still young enough that its demise didn’t cause any collateral damage, other than to our morale.
Storms that come in August seem to be of a violent nature. I remember the one on my birthday in ’65 that lightning struck Davidson’s home and it burned to the ground. August was also the month of the worst plane crash at DFW during a wind sheer storm. We had lots of sky fireworks last Friday with little rain here.
We’ve actually been very fortunate…and our neighbors equally unfortunate. Earlier this year, we had a bad spring windstorm and they lost several shingles from their roof. We had no damage whatsoever.
As bad as this is, it pales in comparison to the damage caused an the ice storm some years ago. I’ll take high, straight-line winds almost any day over ice.