Quote of the Day - 03/08/2012
/On April 13, 1360, while Edward’s soldiers marched toward Chartres, the skies went dark. The air became bitterly cold. The heavens opened, and an apocalyptic storm sent hail stones the size of pigeon eggs smashing into Edward’s army. Tents were shredded. Luggage carts were swept away. Lightning electrocuted knights in their armor. Hundreds of men and more than a thousand horses died. - Bryn Barnard in Dangerous Planet: Natural Disasters That Changed History
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The event described above resulted in the end of the first phase of the Hundred Years War….significant enough that it was judged to be a natural disaster that ‘changed history.’
What about the more frequent weather disasters that we hear about in the news and may even experience? They change lives of individuals and give virtually every family a cache of weather disaster stories that builds up over the years.
Hail has a place in my family history. My dad’s parked car was totaled by a hail storm in the early 1950s - a cautionary tale in the family supporting the ideas of parking cars in the garage and keeping yourself inside during hail storms…and having good car insurance.
In the mid-1960s I remember being in the backyard of our house on a semi-sunny day and hearing what I immediately thought was hail (not sure why I thought that it was) and ran to the cover of the large porch with my sisters just seconds ahead of the hail cloud coming overhead…and watching the small ice balls dropping on the yard from safety. It was over almost as quickly as it arrived.
Some 10 years later my husband and I were on a canoe trip; we were camped by a river. A storm came through during the night with howling winds. The tree tops were whipping around and it was raining very hard. We heard the canoes banging around but the stakes were holding them to the shore. The next day as we canoed on down the river we immediately noticed uprooted trees and debris along the banks. Later we heard that tornados have come through the area. The bluff we had camped beside had evidently protected our campsite.
