"Inland Hurricane" Devastates Southern Illinois Friday (With Lots Of Pics)

[JFN1]

Look at that monster...




This sucker hit So. Illinois, SE Missouri, NW Kentucky, and So. Indiana on Friday. Local meteorologists are calling it an "inland hurricane." But don't look to the national media for any news on this event - it is non-existent.


Sustained winds averaged 86 MPH (96 by another estimate), but no one is certain, as the equipment used to measure these things was torn to shreds.


Did I mention the gusts? Highest gusts are estimated between 106 and 121 MPH.


This went on for FORTY FIVE MINUTES as the storm sat over us, rotating. The sustained winds put it in the Category 1 to Category 2 hurricane class.


The radar hits all look like a hurricane. The storm behaved EXACTLY like a hurricane, with an eye, wall winds, and the outer edge of the storm was spinning (blowing) faster than the interior.


The damage is incredibly widespread, covering an area roughly 40 miles wide by 120 miles long.


Global warming? Nah, of course not. We always get storms like this in the heart of the continent...NOT.


Better get used to it, folks. The science types around here predict more of these storms to come.


Did I mention our new governor has yet to declare an emergency down here? There is no power for about 160,000 people, and full power may not be restored for weeks. And the Federal government response has also been non-existent.


I went out and about the two counties closest to my home that were damaged by the storm today, Williamson and Franklin Counties.  Jackson County, home of SIU, has been hit just as hard, as have many other counties.



Tree blown over in cemetary



Tree crushed apartment building



There is a house under there...



Another house squished...



And another...



And another...



And another...



And another...



Crushed truck (the dirt around the roots was as tall as I am (6')...



Another house literally buried in fallen trees...



Our local airport hanger - the back end is shredded off of the building entirely...



Power lines look like this all over the area...



My sister's street - note the huge tree down the street laying on the ground...



My sister's house...



What remains of the oldest known tree in Williamson County, Illinois - estimated to be over 200 years old...



My parents got lucky - lost a tree and a window...



The pole in the middle is one leg of a HUGE sign that used to be there - if you look to the right, you'll see the stub of the sign's other leg...



Just outside of Johnston City, Illinois - the entire road looks like this for about five miles, with trees just pushed over...



A whole stand of trees uprooted, pulling the earth up with them, crashed into the house to the right...


+   +   +   +


There is so much more - what you've seen is just a small sample of the devastation. What appears to have been an inland hurricane, has occurred within the United States of America.


People need to know about this....

[HarukaTheTrophyWife]

1. Holy crap

The radar screen is freaky to see.

[liberal N proud]

2. I wonder if that is the same system they waned us about on Saturday

The wind blew steady all day but did not materialize to the degree the weather forecasters predicted, thankfully.

Hope everyone is safe.

[malaise]

3. Are you serious?

What are the Weather Channel people saying?

Strange and interesting but climate change may produce all sorts of weird weather phenomena - stay safe.

I noticed that West Virginia had serious floods with all sorts of mud slides today. I'm curious about the link between mountain top coal mining and those mud slides.

[JFN1]

4. They, and the rest of the media, are silent.

Not a word about this anywhere that I have been able to find...

[malaise]

7. Wow

Keep us posted - this is amazing. Was there lots of rain with the system?

[JFN1]

8. Estimates are between 4 and 6 inches of rain

in about 45 minutes as the storm passed through.

[MadMaddie]

5. I wonder if Vitters hold on our new FEMA director will come up

The storm season is upon us

[GreenPartyVoter]

6. Holy moly!

[MO_Dem]

9. It blew through here on it's way there

We have 3 trees down in our yard and a limb fell on the roof and knocked a few shingles off and messed up the gutter. Everybody in our neighborhood has at least some damage, some have lots of damage. Our power was off for 7 or 8 hours, and phone, cable and internet was out for 24 hours. Stores and businesses were closed the rest of the day Friday, except for a couple of convenience stores selling ice.

[pleah]

10. My family lives in Franklin County. They are all alright.

Thankfully. I talked to them today.

[Renew Deal]

11. If a tree blows over in a cemetary, is there anyone there to hear it?

And if not, does it make a sound?

[DCKit]

29. When the zombies show up, you'll be sorry. n/t

[WePurrsevere]

12. Wow.. thanks for the pics. FWIW Gov Quin declared 3 counties disaster areas yesterday...

were there more that were effected? http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-il-severestorms-quin,0,299226.story

It's amazing that this hasn't hit national news. I had never heard of an inland hurricane. We get hurricane winds up here now and then but the storm's radar looks like a normal pattern.. .not like that. Wow... I'm really glad your family made it through okay.

[here_is_to_hope]

13. Good link here...

http://chicagoist.com/2009/05/10/hundreds_of_thousands_without_power.php

[KittyWampus]

14. thanks for your reporting. I never knew there were inland hurricanes.

[Strelnikov_]

15. On radar it sure looked like a Hurricane n/t

[AwakeAtLast]

16. So sorry to hear about this!

We were staying with my parents this weekend, who live about 50 miles north (Edwards Co.) of you and we got a little rain but nothing of what you describe. Dad saw it on the local (Evansville, IN) news this morning.

Hope you get the help you need SOON!

:hi:

[DLnyc]

17. Yes, I saw the sattelite pictures

Bigger than usual monster cell with feeder bands. I watch these storms a lot, don't recall seeing feeder bands inland before, except for when a (ocean based) hurricane comes onto land.

(Tried to get some pictures for you, but I can't get the archived pictures to post here; try Friday "last week" around 1845Z)
http://www.goes.noaa.gov/srcheast.html

[ColbertWatcher]

18. Wow. People do need to know about this. Thank you for posting. k+r, n/t

[chimpyisstillsatan]

19. Not to diminish the significance of these events, but...

in the universe of possibilities, 45 minutes of high winds isn't even in the same galaxy as a hurricane. Hell, there were still leaves on the deciduous trees in those pictures. I've seen needles stripped off pine trees after a hurricane...

[KittyWampus]

22. radar looks like there was rotation, eye wall etc.

[merh]

31. Not even the same galaxy

as one of the weather guru's states at a link provided in this thread:

Obviously such an event cannot begin to compare to a hurricane because it is short-lived, lacks a surge, and doesn't produce torrential, flooding rainfall. With that being said, it's still a pretty significant weather phenomenon.
http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2009/05/midwest_experie.html

[Occulus]

39. If this thing had crossed Lake Michigan,

What do you think would have been the result?

[NeedleCast]

43. Very Little

Waters of Lake Michigan are far, far to cold this time of year (and really any time of year) to fuel tropcial storms.

[JFN1]

32. It wasn't just winds

It was also 4-6 inches of rain in about 45 minutes. I saw whole stands of trees stripped of leaves and limbs, I saw a couple of trees that had the bark stripped off of them, along with the limbs - looked like big, stained toothpicks sticking up into the sky...

And no, there was no surge to accompany this storm; had there been a large enough body of water, I have no doubt whatsoever it would have produced a sizable surge.

I was stuck on I-57 during this storm. I went through hurricane Andrew when I was stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The experiences are similar enough as to denote no particular difference for me, save I experienced Andrew in a building, and this storm, in a car hastily pulled over next to an overpass.

One elderly couple in a van was about three or four cars ahead of us, parked on the shoulder. A big tree fell on their van in the middle of the storm. None of us could get out to check on them, as there was so much debris in the air, and the winds were fierce. After the storm passed, a bunch of us got out and checked on them, but we did not remove them from the car - we let EMS do that, as we could not get the doors open because the tree had squashed the roof and doors together.

After that, it took us 1.5 hours to travel 14 miles after we got back on the road. The pics I posted were taken today, two days after the storm passed, and do not reflect all of the devastation, as much of it was cleaned up so that traffic could resume. There were so many trees blocking the interstate my wife stopped counting at 100...and this was in the space of about two miles.

[chimpyisstillsatan]

34. I'm sorry for your distress

Many people have a particularly horrendous, recurring nightmare that visits them on occasion. Mine is of tornadoes, probably from my exeriences in hurricane Camille, which I am too young to remember in any detail. As an adult, Andrew and Charley helped helped to solidify the terror, each giving us about 8 hours of unrelenting Hurricane force winds. As the Big Dog used to say, I feel your pain.

I can only recommend three things. First, move away if you can. The weather's not going away. I am in SoCal now and only rarely worry about earthquakes. If you can't move, get a NOAA radio with SAME coding. When I lived in Indiana, I slept better knowing that I didn't have to ride out each nightime storm with an ear out for the sirens. Ugh, shivers down the spine. Lastly, help others clean up after the storm. It's therapeutic, and has the added benefit of being the right thing to do.

Take care.

[lovuian]

20. Wind speeds will increase

because of increase temperature and other factors

[Beam Me Up]

21. NYT: Storms Cut Through Midwest, Killing 5

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 9, 2009
ST. LOUIS (AP) — Residents across the middle of the country began to clean up on Saturday after powerful storms splintered homes, knocked out power to thousands and killed at least six people.

Hundreds of homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed Friday in Kansas, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri and West Virginia, prompting several state-of-emergency declarations.

Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri declared a state of emergency throughout the state.

Gov. Steven L. Beshear of Kentucky declared an emergency in central and southeastern sections of the state, and Gov. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia made the same declaration for six counties in his state.

Gov. Patrick J. Quinn of Illinois declared three southern counties disaster areas. More than 63,000 customers of the Illinois utility company Ameren still had no electricity Saturday, the company said.
...

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/us/10storm.html?ref=global-home

[frogcycle]

23. Sci Guy explains:

http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2009/05/midwest_experie.html


and provides cool gif:

[Catherine Vincent]

24. It snuck up on you guys

Just like tropical storm Alison did a few years ago in Houston.

I hope everything went well on your end.

[knitter4democracy]

25. We've gotten bits of that up here in Michigan. Scary.

My inner storm warning was firing like crazy. The weather for the last couple of weeks has been really odd, and that's starting to become usual. More snow this last winter than I have seen in ages, a cold, wet summer last year and the year before (in comparison to summers here when I was a kid), and the most freakish storms are all starting to become the new normal.

We weren't warned about it up here until the wind hit hard. I have no idea why the media isn't talking about this--this is like that winter hurricane of, what was it, 1978 or 1977, only in the spring, not the usual time at all.

[FourScore]

26. Look at this video.

sounds like a derecho.

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=7505103

[AngryOldDem]

27. Weren't there two derechos last week?

I think one in the south went from Mississippi to South Carolina.

Look for what used to be considered "rare" to become the norm.

[bobbert]

45. yep, looks like a derecho to me

If you look at the post just above you, you can tell that all of the winds are headed from the west. There was just one image where it looked like the storm had a tail when the clouds were starting to break up. There was no eyewall, no rotating gusts, just straight, fierce winds. That's not saying what they had wasn't bad, it was just not even comparable to a hurricane. Power seems to go out with any big storm down there though, I could expect to lose power a couple times a month over the summer in Carbondale.

[CoffeeCat]

28. This happened in Iowa last summer...

In addition to the horrendous floods that did billions in damage, we had one storm that could only
be described as you categorized it, "an inland hurricane".

The pictures you showed look identical to the area around here (central Iowa) after that storm hit. Huge
trees were uprooted, building and homes were damaged. People would drive around neighborhoods, scoping
out the damage and all of the huge trees that were lifted from the ground--now sitting on cars and lying in yards.

I'll NEVER forget that night. My husband woke me up and said, "Do you hear the sirens going off? I think I
might hear them". We couldn't hear the sirens, so we moved into the hallway off of our bedroom. We could
faintly hear the sirens, and just as I heard it I looked out the top floor windows in our foyer and I couldn't
frickin believe what I was seeing. The trees across the street were blowing sideways. It looked like a blinding
hurricane. I was in hurricane Gloria in the late '80's, and it looked just like that.

I screamed, "Get the kids!" and we ran down to the basement and barricaded ourselves under the stairs
with a mattress over us. I'll never forget the howling wind. It sounded like the world was coming to an end.
I thought for sure it was a tornado. Turns out, no tornado--just 85 mph winds and several inches of rain. A huge
monster of a storm.

We lost two 70-ft trees in the backyard, but no property damage. We were lucky.

We're used to bad storms here, even tornado activity. However, this stormed shocked the hell out of me, because
it looked exactly like a hurricane.

[undergroundpanther]

30. Derecho

It was one..

http://www.spc.noaa.gov/misc/AbtDerechos/derechofacts.htm

[Delphinus]

33. Wow!

I'm so glad you posted!

[notadmblnd]

35. We had a storm similar to this the week of April 24th

that left approx 1/2 million people with out electricity. High winds and rain blew through for about 45 minutes. No one mentioned it was an inland hurricane. I figured it was just that time of year in this part of the country, it's happened on occasion throughout my life. I'm 50, I'm from Michigan. There was also no Federal disaster declared.

[uppityperson]

36. k&r, what a mess, hoping clean up goes fast and Emergency status gained quickly

[apriddygirl]

37. last picture on this blog

The last picture on this blog is of my house, and I just wanted to politely correct the blogger. It wasn't a whole stand of trees which fell on my neighbor's house but one HUGE elm tree. It ripped up our drive way and yard like old carpet. (It certainly looks like a bunch of trees though, and trust me, when we cut it up, we had enough fire wood to last a life time) It was probably 100 years old. I feel like I have lost an old friend. Anyways, this storm was a huge blow to us all. Also, free fire wood for those who inquire :)

[JFN1]

38. Thanks for the correction

I have also placed a correction on my blog: http://justicefornone.com//article.php/20090510181719597

From the angle I was at on the road, and the way the trees were laying, it sure looked like a whole row of trees that fell. But then, it was all such a mess, and difficult to tell the still living trees from the fallen ones. And to lose such a big, old tree is sad...

So is the neighbor's house okay? Is yours? Was the driveway damaged? Because it looked like it had to be...

[apriddygirl]

41. Tree damage

Thanks for your concern! Our neighbor's house only sustained minimal damage (Thank God) and no one was hurt, so we have much to be thankful for. We have to have our drive way fixed and some dirt brought in to fill in the ground where the tree has stood for 100 years, but things could have been far worse.

[Lorien]

40. Looks like a category 1 with 85-95 mph winds and gusts around 105

Not fun at all. This is what a category 2 with gusts of 120 did to my neighborhood several years ago:









I know how hard it is to lose old trees. They are indeed like old friends. :hug:

[mod mom]

42. You should have seen central Ohio after Hurricane Ike- a real efederal disaster area!

we went w/o power for 6 days.

[slackmaster]

44. Looks and acts a lot like a hurricane but in reality it was a very different critter

A tropical cyclone has a warm core. The internal low pressure results from very warm air lifting. This was a cold-cored spring storm.

[Uncle Joe]

46. Damn, that looks rough, I hope everyone is safe.

Thanks for the pics, JFN.