Reply #32: It wasn't just winds

[JFN1]

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.