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Thursday, September 16, 2010

Nasty weather

A little bit before I left from work, I heard some hard rain and some loud thunder.  This was pretty significant, as my office is in a warehouse kind of environment where there are no windows; and the ceiling is very high.  To hear the rain pelt against the roof meant that it was raining very, very hard.

A thin line of severe thunderstorms passed through the area in under 45 minutes.  By the time I got to my car, it was still cloudy, but had stopped raining.  Off to the east, I could see the dark, ominous looking clouds and numerous cloud to ground lightning strikes.

Once I got moving, I tuned the VHF/UHF radio immediately to the Middlesex County SkyWarn net on the K2GE, Sayreville repeater.  While Middlesex County was beginning to be hit hard, I advised the net that the action was already over in Somerset County (where I work) and that it wouldn't last long in Middlesex County.

Reports started coming in of some places receiving quarter sized hail and winds in the 40+ mph hour range, along with rainfall rates approaching 2 - 3 inches per hour.  As bad as that was, it seems that the NYC boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens bore the worst of it.  A funnel cloud was reported; and while it has not been confirmed as a tornado (as of yet), the resulting damage was plenty.  It could have been a macroburst as I heard reports on some of the NYC area repeaters of tree limbs ripping through buses; and people being dug out from under piles of falling debris.  There was also an unverified report of a man being killed by a tree falling on top of his car.

I'll have to make a point to watch the 11:00 news tonight to see just how bad NYC was hit.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!

2 comments:

  1. On the news this morning I heard them say 100 mph winds in Brooklyn? Wow.

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  2. Rob,

    On the 11:00 PM Channel 2 news, the weather person was relating the fact that WCBS has a remote weather station on one of the piers in Jersey Ciy. As the storm crossed the river, the anemometer recorded a 122 MPH wind gust.

    BTW, the one fatality was a woman and not a man. She pulled her car over to the side of the Grand Central Parkway in Queens due to poor driving visiblity. A tree fell on the car and crushed her to death. Her two passengers survived with only minor bruises and scrapes.

    Larry W2LJ

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