This post involves a few of my encounters with weather. It has nothing to do with engineering, but I thought a few of my weather-related adventures might be of interest to some, perhaps stirring up similar memories.
As a second or third grader- perhaps 1934- I lived with my parents and grandparents on Martha’s Vineyard in a two-story seven bedroom house allegedly built about 1730. It was known as ‘The Old Great House”, and the story goes that when a young couple in Chilmark married, they would often set up housekeeping in one of those bedrooms while they were building their own house. We had moved back in with the grandparents during the great depression.
One afternoon we heard (by radio?) that we should expect a “tempest” that evening. That was the terminology for thunderstorm at that time and place. We had a large room which served as kitchen and dining area, and that evening we ate supper accompanied by lightning and thunder. When the meal was finished, my mother and grandmother washed the dishes. At a moment when my mother had stepped to one side of the kitchen sink while drying dishes and grandmother had stepped to the other side to put some dishes away, lightning struck.
A large fireball appeared, apparently from the water faucet, danced around in the sink for a few seconds, then disappeared down the drain.
Still deafened by the thunderclap, I could barely hear myself shouting ,“Is the house on fire, is the house on fire?” Dad had already taken off running to check that out. The only fire he found was in a can of gasoline drippings from our electrical generator. We were connected to a recently installed public power system, but still retained the generator, anticipating power outages. He put that out, then returned to wait for the storm to end.
When it had abated somewhat, we heard a pounding on the door. It was Eva Look, our neighbor from across the road, encased in yellow oilskins and sou’wester. Eva was a deaf-mute, but my mother and grandmother were both proficient in sign language. The three of them were talking, and to me their hands were a blur of motion. Eva had seen the lightning strike, and she told us that it was three-pronged, striking the house, the garage, and a power pole in front of the house. The next day, we were able to verify her story; there was damage in all three places.
Years later, about 1949, I was returning to Chilmark by Greyhound bus for a Christmas vacation from college in Louisville. The grandparents had now passed on, and my parents lived in a house on the South Road in Chilmark. A major blizzard hit New York and New England, and when the bus arrived in New York City, only a couple of lanes of the main street had been ploughed out. As we cruised down Broadway, all the side streets had an unbroken blanket of about 17 inches of snow. But I changed busses and departed for New Bedford, and the roads were passable, And the Island steamship was running.
Martha’s Vineyard had it’s own problems. Here, the storm dropped freezing sleet which built up on the power and phone wires until they broke of the weight. My parents cooked on a cast iron stove, originally wood-burning but now fitted with kerosene burners. We had a kerosene powered refrigerator (Servel Electrolux), and they located some kerosene lamps. So life went on. But we learned how much we depended on electricity. Gas stations couldn’t pump gas, many houses including ours had electric water pumps, and those with thermostatically controlled oil furnaces were without heat. We still had a working manual cast-iron pump (after replacing a “leather”), and we provided water for some of our neighbors.
Vineyard Haven had it’s power restored fairly quickly, but up-island, it took longer. Day by day, we could see the lights on in houses progressively closer to us, and in about a week, our power was restored. The telephone servicemen meanwhile were using the technique I had seen in the army – laying out temporary wires along the roadsides and over snowdrifts. So before I returned to Louisville, life on Martha’s Vineyard had returned pretty much to normal.
Elsewhere in this website I told of the time I waited out a downpour in the cockpit of a parked P-51 fighter plane. Many years later, I had a more serious encounter with heavy precipitation. About 1996, Sally and I were returning to Manhattan Beach. CA from our condo in Mammoth Lakes. As we proceeded south on US route 395 and California route 14, we encountered some rain, but didn’t think it unusual. On other trips, when passing this way during daylight hours, we’ve been treated to the sight of spectacular rainbows.
As we entered the area of the Red Rock Canyon State Park, in the Mojave desert, the rain became more intense, and we noticed that the usually dry ditch alongside the road was now a roaring river. A bit farther along, where the path of drainage normally passed under the road, the water was also flowing over the road. Traffic had come to a stop.
The driver of an 18-wheeler had decided to move on, and I examined the hydrodynamics of the situation. His tires showed that the rushing water was only a few inches deep above the road. I decided to follow the truck, with Sally yelling “don’t go”. We successfully crossed to beyond the “river” and thought we were good to go. But about half a mile further on, as we reached the top of a small hill, we came to a complete halt, along with a dozen or two cars and trucks..
We were parked there for seven hours, near the settlement of Cantil. The flash flood had deposited mud and debris on the road ahead. There was a report that “a twelve-foot wall of water” had hit Cantil. My question was, who measured that wall of water? In any event, there were no reported deaths. One woman’s car had been washed off the road, and a truck driver had rescued her.
As the night progressed, the totally black sky gave way to the clearest star-studded sky you’re likely to see. With the aid of a flashlight, several of us walked on ahead to look at the damage. At the Cantil bridge, one lane of the road was eroded away, and there was mud and debris everywhere.
Finally, at about 2 AM, the Caltrans road workers cleared a path with their bulldozers. They then escorted us out of the affected area – first the passenger cars, then the trucks. We arrived home many hours late, but no worse for the wear.
The next day on TV we saw films of extensive damage to the road at the spot where we had forded the ”river”. It took some weeks for the state to rebuild the road.
We’ve gone back to the condo many times since then, and as we pass the spot where we spent seven hours waiting, someone will say, “Our hill.”