Crazy Weather

[Karl Valten]

Alrighty, my sister and I have been pretty much gone for the last week or so. If any of you have taken a look at the weather channel this week pretty much most of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin have been under a solid storm cell.

Where we live we've been dealing with pretty much constant severe thunderstorms and tornado warnings/watches. Hell a few of the graduation parties I was at had some nice funnel clouds spinning overhead. We personally haven't been hit yet, but there have been some touchdowns within 15-20 miles.

Big thing for us are the flashfloods, we live right on the Wisconsin River and a lot of roads have washed out and even have had major highways closed.

The worst event was Lake Delton (about 200 acres) broke through a natural dam a completely drained into the Wisconsin River. I have no clue what the Wisconsin Dells residents are going to do. The city absolutely relies on tourism and Lake Delton and a good deal of water shows and boat tours leading up the river.

http://www.nbc15.com/home/headlines/19700519.html

[Wyl Staedtler]

Yikes, I've been hearing about this. Stay safe buddy. :(

[Park Kraken]

Makes me wish I was up there with you Karl (seeing as how Storm Chasing is my hobby), we haven't had much in the way of local activity until starting about a week ago. And with the storms came with the tornadoes. We had one tornado wreck a neighborhood in Fort Myers, and a funnel cloud was reported over Epcot Center/MGM Studios in Orlando.

I read about the Boy Scout camp in SW Iowa being torn up. About a month ago there was an article in the paper talking about this year being on track to break the records for both number of tornadoes occured in a year, and the number of deaths attributed to tornadoes, and this latest activity just adds to the track to record breaking.

[Karl Valten]

Yeah, we have a 60 mpg winds and torrential rain right now. Several of the roads in town are flooded over and I'm pretty sure the Wisconsin river is running over the embankment in a few places.

Lightning has been hitting ground and up to golf-ball sized hail is in the area.

Sooooooooooooooooooooooooo, I'm going to go take cover now.

[Alpha]

Stay safe Karl. And while you're at it see about trying to shift some of those storms into New Mexico. We need something to break our 90-100 degree heat. (I have no AC right now. :()

[Karl Valten]

Update on the weather here. We've had sun for the last day and a half so it looks like the most of the storm cells are past.

But damn the damage is insane here, the newspapers are already calling it the "Flood of '08". Several hundred roads are closed down or completely washed out. 80 miles of interstate are out and all the traffic is detoured through the middle of our town. I guess that happens when we're the only town that has a bridge over the river for 20 miles in either direction.

Several towns have been evacuated all over the state and a few damns are beggining to fail under the stress. Here where I live, the damn is full open to try to keep Lake Wisconsin from breaking past the flood levels. We usually have perfectly calm water under the damns, but now there are 30-40 foot plumes and the river is up about 20 feet.

Really insane stuff. I feel bad for my cousins that live in a town a couple miles up the interstate. Water is almost 10 feet about flood levels there. It looks like where I am we got lucky.

[Morgan Evanar]

This is why living in a flood plain is bad :(

[Karl Valten]

Yeah, it wasn't a flood plain around here until the Lake Delton broke through the natural dam and flooded us with 230 acres of water. Department of Natural Resources is trying to redraw the lines.