man plans and God laughs

[cellio]

This morning I was talking with a coworker about storms and commented that I sometimes like to watch a good thunderstorm -- lightning, sheets of rain, etc -- so long as it's from indoors or the protection of my front porch.

I see I should have been more clear. I do not think a car counts as "indoors".

It was an exciting drive home! It's not often that I see deep-enough-to-be-troubling pools of water on roads on hills.

Comments

[magid.livejournal.com]

There were exciting thunderstorms here at approximately the same time; I always assume you get the weather first....

[cellio]

I think we usually get it first, but not always -- and sometimes you get stuff that moved along the coast and that we don't get at all.

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

A friend tried to drive us to the train station during the storm this past weekend. She gave up partway there because the van's engine was sounding wrong and we just made it back to their parking slot (and not quite all the way in, but close enough). While we were driving, there were waves going out from the front and sides of the van, either low on the water or splashing at least half-way up the van's height, depending on our speed. (P.S. their parking slot turned into a pond, so the van ended up parked in about 2 feet of water for a while - not good.) A different friend ended up driving us home later. There was one place where we took a detour b/c there was a (multi?) block long flood.

[cellio]

Wow! Two feet of water sure can't be good for the van.

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

We had an impressive storm this evening too. Fairly heavy rain, with parts of the Grand Central Parkway six inches deep or so... but the lightning! It seemed like every ten seconds or so there would be a "cut here" line across the sky.

[cellio]

We had less lightning but, it sounds like, more torrents. There were a couple times when I was driving pretty much purely by the clues from the tail-lights in front of me -- but I didn't dare stop or I'd risk being rear-ended. Fortunately, I commute via local roads, not highways.

There is a sad ending to this storm: a (somewhat major) road a few miles from my house had flash floods with water deep enough that people were swimming away from their cars, and three people didn't make it out. :-( What's weird is that this isn't really a local low point; something major must have gone wrong. Presumably there's a major storm drain under that street (it's near the river), because the news reported that all the manhole covers along that stretch had blown.