Have you ever experienced a severe storm?

Severe storms seem to be very topical at the moment, with all the talk of global warming… I have fortunately never been really impacted by a storm, but have memories of the effects of severe weather conditions. When we lived on the North East Coast in England, winters were pretty fierce and we had some terrific storms.I remember going down to the promenade with my Dad to watch the enormous waves crashing in, up and over the sea defences, very dramatic and quite frightening.

We had a winter storm here in Campbell River in February 2013 with severe gale force winds. Power was knocked out by falling trees and several roads were completely blocked. Several of our neighbours had trees come down over their roofs and there was quite a clean up job to do of fallen branches, some quite large. A storm that I do remember was in 1995 when Dad & I were in Australia, we were camping with our group in the Red Centre near King’s Canyon, when we were given warning of an approaching sandstorm.

WE could see a huge dust cloud approaching and were told to make sure that our tents were securely battened down and just to wait it out until it had blown over. I remember sitting in the tent with the noise of the wind and the wild battering of the sand beating on the tent canvas, the daylight had almost gone with the sand clouding over the sunlight. When it was all over, we peeked out and the red sand was EVERYWHERE in drifted heaps. It had to be cleaned off everything and for months afterwards we found little pockets of sand in things that we had had with us.

The bonus was that there was so much dust in the atmosphere that the sunsets and sunrises were amazing for days afterwards.