Karla's Kolumn: Well, hail

 

June 6, 2019

I'm not a weather watcher. What I mean is I don't really look ahead to see what the weather will be like tomorrow or the weekend or next week.

It doesn't matter the season. I wake up, check the temperature and decide what to wear.

My husband, who depends on good weather for his business, does watch the weather, especially in the spring and summer.

Weather is a funny thing. Everyone loves to talk about. No one agrees on it. Some love snow others do not. Some love the heat, others the cold. Some love rain especially thunderstorms and lightning storms. Others do not.


And no one can really predict what it is going to do or where the weather pattern might exactly strike.

Case in point. I have signed up for Code Red and Rapid Notify. Under Code Red I have signed up for any severe weather in my home area, about eight miles south of Worland. On Sunday, I received an alert that there was some lightning in my area, about a mile or so away.


I saw some clouds but I did not get a severe thunderstorm warning.

We started to hear thunder so my husband and yes, even I checked the forecast to see what kind of storm was building. No warnings or watches, just possible isolated thunderstorms, nothing out of the ordinary for Wyoming in the summer.


Then we began hearing the pelting on our roof. That wasn't rain, that was hail. We look outside, yup some small hail coming down intermittently and then the skies opened up and hail and rain came.

I'm looking out the back window and my husband goes to look out the front window. "We're flooding," he says. "Come look."

Sure enough there was more standing water than we had when we received the record rainfall over a few days the week before.

When the hail quit there was light rain and we went and check out the area and saw the water flowing across our pasture down to our shop road and then following the road around the shop. I called it our mini flash flood.

My flowers, freshly planted a week ago, took a beating. I could tell on Tuesday that most will survive but I don't think one particular plant will come back. I'm also not sure about my rhubarb plant that was flattened like a pancake.

Worland received no moisture in town that day, no hail.

In past years (I can only attest to the past four) it seemed as if the storms would build and we'd watch them come and then move around us and all summer we'd beg for a drop of rain but got none. Sunday, we got plenty.

Which makes me wonder if this year the weather pattern will bring the storms right to our place each time or was this just a freak occurrence. Only time will tell.

That's the thing about weather, no one knows where it is going or when it will get there. We just have to tune in, hope for the best, ride out the storms when they come and clean up after.

Here's hoping for "normal" summer weather, whatever that might be.

 
 

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