March 15 -- storm

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March 15 was another very unseasonably warm day. Over 70. The weather prediction was for a 50% chance of precipitation.

I walked me, and the dog, as it started to cloud up, between 3:00 and 4:00.

At 5:00-ish, it started to thunder, so I turned off, and unplugged, the computer.

Friday is trash day, so I gathered up the trash. As I walked the bin out to the curb, it started to rain. The sky was full of well-defined clouds, and there was lots of lightning, some of it nearly overhead. I thought maybe it wasn't a good idea to be outside, even though there was no wind at all, so I went in.

At 5:30-ish the tornado sirens went off. There was still no wind, but it was raining.

It rained pretty hard, and hailed, on and off. The hailstones were bigger than I'd ever seen in person -- some of them an inch in diameter.

It rained hard, for a long time, and hailed intermittently, but there was never any wind.

Odd.

I had the tv on.  I watched coverage of a tornado touchdown less than 10 miles from Ann Arbor. A few houses in Dexter (west and north of Ann Arbor) were demolished, and many more were damaged. It's strange how so much destructive power can be so focused. It seemed that the part of the storm that touched the ground wasn't much bigger than a single suburban property. The tornado apparently bounced, demolishing one house in one block, and then skipping to another block to demolish another house.

(No reports of serious injuries, I am glad to say.)

And the rain poured down. I've never seen it so deep, in our back yard. They said on tv that we got 4.25 inches, in the couple of hours the storm sat on Ann Arbor. I've seen images of cars in an Ann Arbor apartment-building parking lot, submerged halfway up the doors. Yikes. It's good to live at the top of the hill. Which we don't, quite, but nearly.

Our daughter was supposed to get off work during all this. I called and told her to stay there, and she said that was her plan.

My husband was on a golf course. He watched the Weather Channel from the club house, after the thunder began.  He, and the guy he was playing with, decided quitting for the day was the better part of valor. He was able to get home through the heavy rain.

Neither car apparently sustained any damage. (On tv I heard people north of us say they'd had baseball-size hail interspersed with golf-ball-size hail.)

Michigan doesn't see many tornadoes, especially not this early in the season.

I am grateful that it wasn't any worse.

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