Some Storm, Eh? And Way Worse for Some than others…

by Prince Of Petworth July 20, 2016 at 9:40 am 27 Comments

storm

A reader send the shot above from 35th and Quebec St, NW:

“The uprooted section had to be at least ten feet long. Fortunately the house didn’t appear too damaged though I’m sure it is.”

Hail in Petworth

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Hail in NE Hail from Phil

Geeeeeeeeeez this hail is about to break my damn window! Yall be safe in them streets! @PoPville #SWDC pic.twitter.com/IKQxmbI6y6

— iCan (@ianeyecan) July 20, 2016

Hail in SW

and then this

@PoPville outdoor drain at basement back door just pumping sewage up right now #petworth #rain #awesome #fun #yay pic.twitter.com/9njOPFaG97

— Ken O' (@kennethoregan) July 20, 2016

Effie

What a storm last night. My windows sounded like they were going to break and tree branches were in the street. The power went out on my entire street too. The good thing at least was that this morning it was in the late 60’s, early 70’s it felt nice outside.
CHGal

Also strange that such a large storm seemed to come with no warning. Unless I missed it, there hadn’t been a forecast of much rain, and I didn’t get the alert from DC until it was hailing full-force.
- wdc
  
  My weather app said
  9pm: Clear
  10pm: Clear
  11pm: Clear
  12am: Clear
  .
  If I were a social media maker (I’m mostly a taker), I would have figured out how to take a picture of the app’s forecast with the torrential rain and hailstones in the background.
  - ah
    
    I started getting alerts from Weather Channel shortly before it hit NW as well as National Weather Service alerts pushed to the emergency alerts on my phone
  - DRC
    
    It was pretty nuts that there was hardly any warning. I saw flashes of light outside my window around 10:15 and went outside to find a huge cloud producing almost constant lightning. Checked the radar and saw nothing of interest. Then around 11 there was some faint thunder and I checked the radar again to find an intense storm cell of purple right over top of DC. Thankfully I was right on the edge of it so we just got some rain and mild winds.
    
    Oh, and you guys can turn off those crazy weather alerts/amber alerts that blare out a siren from your phone with no warning. It’s one of the first things I do when I get a new phone
- jeslett
  
  I got a lightening warning and possible a storm one too. Also, Capital Weather Gang on NPR said there was a possibility for storms last night. As such, I packed an umbrella, though that would have done nothing had I been out in it.
  - Anonymous
    
    I actually saw a man walking down our street during the first very heavy part of the storm. He was holding an umbrella but it couldn’t possibly have been doing much good. At least his head didn’t get directly pelted by the hail.
- JoDa
  
  It blew up kind of out of nowhere (radar went directly from clear to significant thunderstorm). However, a cold front did come through and there was a known chance that storms could happen, and I think that should have been more widely advertised. No forecast I looked at/heard said anything about even the slight potential for storms. I’m not one for scaring people unnecessarily, but a message of “it’s unlikely, but the conditions are such that this front may cause strong storms late in the evening” would have sufficed so that people could take minor precautions. We had to run out and secure our patio furniture in the rain and hail since the winds were much stronger than we expected. We would have tied it down before the storm (aka before bed!) had we known it might storm.
  - CHGal
    
    Just in comparison to Monday afternoon’s rain, when I had multiple alerts before the clouds even started to roll in, it seemed off. But that’s weather I guess!
Clueless

Did anyone see the large tree at Farragut Square that was split in half? It was like lightening had zapped it straight down the middle.
- Pixie
  
  Yup, I saw it this morning! Crazy to see a tree split in half like that.
Whitney

I am a grown ass woman and i was freaking terrified yesterday. I think it was the hail that i was hearing, but dayuummmm…….thought my windows or roof were going to cave in. I actually shouted at one point to “MAKE IT STOP!” (i was losing my mind for a bit there) it was just so gosh darn loud! gah. of course my dog was like dead asleep. wtf. not cool. i needed him to snuggle with, but he was like “get off me before i kill you. i am trying to sleep dammit…” LMAO
- Brentwood
  
  Aww, I’m sorry your dog was not helpful. I had the opposite problem with mine, I was sitting on my (enclosed) sun porch watching the storm (love lightening and thunder), and my dog kept nosing me to go back in the house.
  - wdc
    
    New Baby Kitty was so freaked out, it was comical. He was peering out the window, running to me to look at me imploringly with his tail all puffed up, then going to check the other windows. Around and around, poor guy. And then the cell phone alerts went off and scared the kids to the point of tears, and I had to share my bed with a lot more bodies than usual.
    - textdoc
      
      Aww, poor kitty!
      .
      (Has he been in AAF since he got big?)
- kanon
  
  Aw, my dog was asleep, but I woke her and brought her in to bed with me because I was scared and needed to snuggle her.
- Jill
  
  First I was terrified because there was a huge crash of thunder followed by flickering light (which turned out to be more lightning, but I was worried something nearby got struck and was on fire). Then the hail! I probably got the worst of it since I’m in SE Capitol Hill. I forced my dogs to snuggle with me too, though they seemed unconcerned by the apologetically conditions outside.
AnonV2

It was unreal for a bit there. I was downstairs next to a window facing the alley when the rain started to really come down, then heard kind of a distant rumbling outside that wasn’t thunder and sounded for all the world like somebody dragging their trash cans out for pick up. I thought “You chose NOW to get the cans out? Smart!” Then the hail hit and I realized what I had been hearing was a line of hail slowly advancing up the street. Nickel-to-quarter sized hail in LeDroit.
P. Lecheval

Except for the lack of strong winds, it reminded me a lot of the derecho we experienced a few years ago. The nearly constant lightning was amazing!
- ah
  
  Oh, we got wind too. Maybe not derecho level, but it was blowing the rain close to horizontal at times.
  - ***
    
    Yeah the wind was intense. I was trying to find cover on my bike and nearly got blown over.
palisades

Adrian Gonzalez (Dodgers player) posted a video on Twitter of crazy flooding at the Nats game.
- Anon
  
  I was at the game and fortunately it finished before the storm came. I was on Rock Creek Parkway when it hit and was terrified a tree was going to fall on me. People were just stopping in the middle of the road, which made it scarier (one guy stopped right before the tunnel and people had to go around him, which was so dangerous; finally he started moving again).
Swootang

Can we talk about the drains outside of basement doors? In crazy downpours like last night, my drain outside my basement door just can’t keep up. It overflows and floods the back room in my basement. Is there anything I can do to prevent this or at least minimize the water that comes in the back door when the drain isn’t doing its job? It seems to happen in mere minutes.
- textdoc
  
  If your drain is backing up like that, there is probably a partial clog somewhere. I had a situation like this and tried to fix it with a plumbing snake, but had no success. Eventually I had a plumber fix it.
  .
  In my case, the drain outside the basement door was OK, but a nearby drain that fed into the same drain at the level of my yard wasn’t. Because I also had a leaking gutter directly over that location, I didn’t realize that the reason the ground was getting extra wet was because water was backing up from the drain and spilling over into the ground.
- Steve F
  
  Agree that you likely some something partially blocking your drain. You can also buy some sandbags and put them at your door to keep the waters back (assuming your door opens in)
- skj84
  
  This is exactly how my basement flooded last night. The basement drain was clogged and the secondary drain is covered to the point of not being able to find it. I went from dry basement to an inch of standing water in the last 15 minutes of the storm.

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