Heat Wave & Severe Weather

It almost felt like I wasn't going to make it back from my first 'long-distance' site visit. Whilst staying overnight, the local weather channel showed that very severe storms were heading towards Indiana (pretty much where we were). Anyway, the next day turned out to be really hot & sunny & I just assumed that the bad weather had passed without incident.

As we were travelling back to St Louis on Wednesday 19th July, Cheryl phoned me to say that a really severe storm was moving through Illinois & to make sure that I stayed safe. About an hour later Cheryl phoned again to say that the weather was now heading her way & that she was going down to the basement with Beth. When most of my other co-workers in the minibus started getting phone calls about the weather, it become obvious that this was something really serious.

Other than the minibus being buffeted by strong winds, we were OK. There was even a realy nice sunset to look at as we travelled along the interstate. St Louis wasn't so lucky though. There was widespread damage downtown with trees blown over, traffic lights down, & even a partial building collapse. Cheryl called to say that the tornado sirens were sounding & that the local weather channel indicated that there were strong winds & tornadoes in the vicinity of where we live.

Luckily the storm passed us without any real damage & thanks to our underground power cables, we were lucky enough to keep our power (phew). A lot of other people weren't so lucky with more than 500,000 residents not having power (for up to 10 days after the storm!). This was the worst power outage in St Louis history & with daytime temperatures around 115f this caused real problems as no power = no air conditioning.

A lot of the damage in the metro area was caused by straight-line winds or downbursts that were in the vicinity of 80mph. Areas of damage across Illinois suggested that wind speeds could have approached 90 mph. Two tornado tracks were uncovered across Southwest Illinois near the towns of Bunker Hill and Edwardsville.

A State of Emergency was declared for the St Louis Area, & Governor Matt Blunt called in the National Guard to help with heat evacuations and clean-up efforts from the severe thunderstorms. The temperature rose near 100 degrees once again on Thursday with heat index values as high as 115f.

To make matters worse, more severe thunderstorms formed across Central Missouri during the morning of July 21st. This cluster of thunderstorms formed into a bow echo as they pushed across the St Louis Metro Area producing another swath of wind damage from Central Missouri to Central Illinois. To the north of the apex of the bow a strong circulation produced several tornadoes. This led to many additional power outages & complicated the clean up efforts from the earlier storm damage. Some people who had just gotten their power back from the previous storm suddenly found themselves in the dark once again. (BTW the photos of downtown are courtesy of KMOV-4 & The St Louis Post Dispatch).