WARNING! SEVERE WEATHER WHIPLASH! AKA: The Day After The Week Before...
Greetings from Earthquake Tornado Hurricane Sunny-N-Hot Central!
It always happens in THREES, doesn't it? Got irony much, do we, Commonwealth? ;)
In other words, welcome to Chesterfield County, home of the craziest weather week that has ever had the misfortune to be reported on during the World News. And I was front and center for all of it. Which almost NEVER happens. Shocking, I know. *grin* But, nothing happens here any longer. Nowadays, Richmond is a dead city. As DOA as they come. *sigh* Until WeatherGate 2011 started, that is.
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Stage 1
AKA
Dear Virginia:
WTF?
~XOXO,
Sharma
First, there was the quake. Yes, I did say QUAKE, as in EARTHQUAKE. And, yes, I DO still live in Virginia, where quakes are about as foreign as the Rocky Mountains are to most of the people that live here. We Virginians don't usually get out much. Or at least not out THAT far west. We'll almost always go up North or down South first.
Anyway, for Stage 1, simply use the TARDIS to go back to what was last Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 1:51 PM. I was in my pajamas at the time, as is also the custom in every disaster movie known to man. And I heard a rumble. And everything started shaking. Including my vanity mirror which was made of solid oak. Only, it wasn't shaking like solid wood. It was shaking like a bloody leaf. Footage would have been handy, but my phone had died the night before, and hadn't charged up at the time. Nor (obviously) was I expecting what it turned out to be. Plane crash, bombing, super-low helicopter fly-by, or off-balance washing machine, yes. Earthquake? Not a chance in Hades. So, preparing myself for the inevitable rearrange-the-clothing-so-the-cycle-will-stop-repeating-and-annoying-the-hell-out-of-me-and-my-newly-fragile-mirror, I venture down the hall, open the door, and the reality slams home, as the machine lights are dark and it's hasn't been recently used.
I go downstairs, bewildered. And my mum and I ask each other "What was that? and "Did you feel that?" at the same time.
And then my grandmum hollers out. "It's an Earthquake! It's a 6.0!" Now, this might seem odd, that my East Coast For Life (born at what is now Fort Jackson, South Carolina in 1925, then raised up in Richmond from the age of about 5, and has since almost never left) 85-year-old grandmum might actually know something that we don't. BUT, she and my brother (who no longer lives with us) are the only ones to experience an earthquake of ANY kind before. And they did so out in NorCal while vising my cousin in Mersid, CA. At the time of THAT earthshake thugh, they were really on a mountain trail in the middle of Yosemite National Park. And I think it was the year of the BIG ONE, 1988 or 1989 or 1993 or something like that. (What? I honestly don't know. I was very litttle during all of those years, so I wouldn't have known what was going on nor any of the specifics regardless.)
Moving on...I was not in a position where I could take my own vid of the shaking inmy house as it went down, which kinda sucks, because it prolly won't happen around here again for another 114 years or so. Yep, that's right. The Year of Our Lord 1897 was the last time any state on the East Coast felt anything akin to a 6.0. And the epicenter during that last time was also in the just left of center (alka slightly west) part of Virginia.
Of course, just a few hours afterwards, the media kept downgrading it from a 6.0 to a 5.9 and then to a final Richter scale number of 5.8. And then that night all of the late night hosts that are out in CA. made fun of us East Coasters, because they'd OBVIOUSLY been through much worse, and a 6.0 to them is like having a small trembler or paltry aftershock, and that "We could start talking to them after we had weathered at least an 8 or a 9, but NOT before," and "This proves, once and for all, that the East Coast is made up of a bunch of wussies."
But, whatever. Having ANY kind of earthquake that you can feel moving you and the things around you in such a violent fashion, and doing so completely out of the blue, is FREAKY, ESPECIALLY if you live on the East Coast. You almost expect it to happen on the West Coast, what with their San Andreas Fault and all. But, we don't really even have a visible fault line at all here, and that's counting every East Coast state from Florida to Maine, let alone a NAMED one. So, yeah...I'm back to it being surreal and freaky to experience.
The fun part? NOT that I think quakes are fun, 'cuz they're definitely not. But, our quake powered its way from Centrtal Virginia all the way up to ONTARIO (yep, that is indeed part of CENTRAL CANADA, for those of you not in the know), and down to South Carolina or Georgia. So, EVERYONE on the ENTIRE Atlantic/Eastern Seaboard felt what we were feeling, if only a little bit later. Whereas quakes in Cali are usually only felt in Cali. So, there! There was even a cool cascade effect to the proceedings. People from Virginia phoned other people up in New York and D.C., and were actually able to warn some of them. Sure, it was only about 20 seconds to a minute before, but at least people could semi-prepare themselves.
Anyway, I DO have these tv pics, that show the the details, the epicenter, and the range of such an unusual beastie:
(NOTE: If you look at the second or third photo, my home is located almost exactly halfway between the three yellow dots in southern Louisa County (the epicenter) and the mass of intersecting black lines that represents Richmond. Just follow the boldest black line that's just underneath that dot trifecta on the map to where it intersects with another, singular line coming down from the north. Just a bit west of THAT intersection is where I'm located.)
Here comes the next wave though...
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Stage 2 AKA Virginia Is The New Tornado Alley:
I might have not seen any for myself (so you'll get no pics or vids from me of this stage). But, other locals have said that they might have seen a tornado or three touch down in the vacinity of Richmnond and/or Southern Chesterfield during a regular rainstorm that occurred just a bit over 36 hours before Stage 3 hit us like a sledgehammer, and wiped all word of a paltry tornado or three off the news.
If true though, then that's definitely another freak weather incident for the central Virginian record books. We don't and have never lived in the infamous Tornado Alley. Traditionally, tornados are Dust Bowl and Bread Basket mainstays. Idaho, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas...yes. Virginia? Not even on the same wavelength.
In fact, we can count on two to three fingers the number of actual tornados we've had in the past hundred years, possibly even in the past 200. But, there you go. Virginia is nothing if not consistently inconsistent these days. *sigh*
Alas, it is again time to move along, this time to:
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Stage 3 AKA Hurricane Irene Hits Us Like A Boy & HITS HARD:
A bit over 72 hours on from the Quake, and already a new and BIG natural disaster was barreling down upon us. At least, this time the type of diaster was mundane though, even if the resulting personal damage wasn't.
What was a massive Category 3 hurricane called Irene ran ashore in Cape Hattaras, NC. during the wee dawn hours of Friday at, before swiping at both Virginia Beach and the Richmond-Petersburg areas at pretty much the same time just about a day later, as a weakened-but-still-massively-big-in-area-coverage Category 1 storm.
It lasted all day and most of the night of Saturday, August 27, 2011. I saw one tree, a 50 foot tall maple, as it fell (OUR FIRST-EVER FELLED TREE!!! And we've lived here in the same house for nearly 25 years now. And ironically the property's been through many other, much stronger hurricanes than this one wound up being while we have lived on it).
Then, I heard another tree, this one a super-tall pine (at least 80 feet tall, maybe more), crack viciously in distress, but not fall. I wouldn't know the extent of the damage done to this latter tree until the next day, however. Which was weirdly enough a completely clear and unbearably hot one: at almost 90 degrees, with not a cloud in the sky, from dawn until dusk.
And as I sit here now, two days after Irene blew through taking over 75% of residential electric power out with it, I am thinking that the earthquake might have actually already uprooted the maple (at least partially), only we didn't notice it (as we were more focused on the foundation of our house than the surrounding during that stage of this wild and wacky weather week), and that the 85 mph wind gusts of Irene just finished the job. Who knows? Anyway, here have some cell phone pics of the day after that I took...
A word to the warning: Tree lovers and huggers, you might want to look away now, because the following images are not going to be pretty...
Also? These were all taken in my own personal backyard by my own hand and with my own cell phone, hence the lack of scale for most of these. Just know that the cracked pine is WAY taller than my 3-story house (which is the yellow and white and black thing you'll see in the background of a couple of these shots), and that the felled maple was previously standing up at a height that was at least as tall as our house, or possibly a little taller than it.
The proof that even a so-called "weak" Catergory 1 storm with the name of an early 1900s little girl in pigtails can mean serious business:
The Felled Maple:
The Cracked & Leaning Pine:
Note: I circled the pine twins as I like to call them, so the cracked one of the two pines changed positions from photo to photo. It's the one on the right, then the one on the left thrice in a row, then the one on the right once again, and then it's pretty obvious which one it is, as the last three are of the crack itself, situated some 7 or 8 feet up the pine tree's trunk from the ground.
And that's all she wrote. FINALLY. *wink*
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As a reward for making it to the end of this here VERY LONG posting, here's a bonus three-fer picture of me, my green phone, and my similarly green froggy friend. All I'm missing is a green shirt or other article of green clothing. And we'd all match, despite three different species. *lol* I took it while on my front porch during the nightly hours of June 11, 2011.
I had a severe case of Eyebrow For Great Justice (that one's for you, all you Doctor Who/David Tennant fans out there!) going on though. And I think it's because I was concentrating and trying VERY hard not to move, for fear of scaring him off or frakin' up the picture. Adding to the optical illusion of it all, I was outside with him, and aiming the pic unknowingly through him AND the apparently partially-mirrored-at-night window that his feet are stuck to. If you can make it out, the doorway in the "background" is the one to our kitchen and is fully inside.
(And, yes, it IS a REAL frog. He didn't jump or move at all until I left though. I came back to find him on our door lantern, instead of on the windowpane as he is in this photo, and at that point got a bit of video footage of him slowing moving up the lantern before vanishing.)
~Sharma,
sincerely hoping
that this next week is more stable...