Thunderstorm in Calgary (June 5) w/Movies!

[JesseJ]

Here's 2 great vids I got tonight (need mp4 like Quicktime) Crank the sound and stand back!!!

http://members.shaw.ca/thefatguy/storm1.mp4
http://members.shaw.ca/thefatguy/storm2.mp4

[Jake]

Holy crap. The lightning strike in the first video was close.

[Richard Travale]

That's the one thing I don't like about living here on the island. We rarely get any thunder and lightning storms over here.

[stampeder]

Which neighbourhood was that in, JesseJ? Makes me miss those Prairie storms...

[Nanuuk]

Calgary received 72 MM of rain during that brief storm. Raining all day today.

[hockeymancw]

The funny part was watching people try to drive a Honda Civic though an 8 foot puddle, then having to abandon their car. I guess they weren't around a few years back when the same thing happened.

[farfromover]

Yeah, that was nuts last night. People kiyacking in the street by my house. 8 foot deep roadways and underpasses. Ashfalt literally be broken open by the surging water. Pretty sweet storm I must say.

[JesseJ]

It wasn't really that close. I was behind glass. If you look closely, you can see the outline of the canopy in the pink. It was really behind the house, but the reflection made it look like it hit the truck.

We live in Killarney, just west of Crowchild right on 17th (The Top of the Red Mile). Because we're so close to the river valley, we usually get the good storms that move down the Bow.

[PrimeBane]

This is why I'm glad I live on a hill in NW Calgary

Our dog jumped nearly a foot in the air for one particular batch of thunder.

[stampeder]

One night years ago while having dinner up on the Calgary Tower I witnessed the greatest Calgary rain storm I'd ever seen:

It started out during a beautiful, sunny late afternoon when a touch of greyish-black cloud formed up out past Lk. Minnewanka/Seebe/Morley, which gradually built and built into a huge black monster over about an hour and started coming right into town along the Bow between CFCN and Bowness.

By the time it reached downtown after about an hour and a half from its birth it was hailing and thundering with the worst of them. As we dined, the Tower took a couple of direct hits that blinked the lights a bit. I've heard that the metal spike on top gets hit a couple of hundred times a year. Then the storm moved southeast down past Bonnybrook and Ogden, and as the sky cleared behind it to reveal the setting sun the storm headed down towards Lomond/Vulcan/Barons before veering east towards Brooks and eventually fading from view into the night sky about 3 hours after we'd first seen it.

My out-of-town visitor was floored, and I pretended that it was all just par for the course for us Calgarians! Years later I witnessed a similar thing except in the middle of the night in High River as a storm went from the Sheep River headwaters all the way overhead and across towards Taber and points east...

I've got countless other memories of prairie storms, but now that we live out here on the coast we just don't see anything like that anymore. People don't relate to it here, like Richard Travale says.

[JesseJ]

Here's a clip from a storm last summer. 45mins-1hr of thunder. Just amazing rolling thunder. No lightning, very little or almost no rain. Just thunder.

http://members.shaw.ca/alwaysagriffin/storm06.AVI

[57]

About 20 years ago, I was there for the great hail storm of Calgary. Many people got their cars dented and needed shingle replacement. I believe the insurance cost was over $1 Billion, one of the larger settlements of all time.

I lived in Hawkwood at the time and we didn't get hit, but we did get hit a few years later - it was actually good timing because I needed new shingles and the cedar siding needed new stain and the insurance paid a significant portion.

[farfromover]

Some more pics here:

http://forum.gostampsgo.com/showthread.php?t=7264

[57]

Great pics. I can't quite understand why the sewage system can't handle rain better than that. 70 mm is a fair bit of rain, but many areas receive that "all the time" without that kind of flooding.

It may be related to the fact that so much of the city is now paved that there is less/fewer ground/parkland/trees to soak up the water and it has to "move" to the lowest point, causing flooding in all those underpasses, malls, etc, instead of some of it soaking into the ground. (I understand that if the ground is already saturated, or if the rain falls in a very short time, then there can be issues)

BTW, Mumbai received over 900 mm of rain in 1 day July 28, 2005. I just recently saw a programme about it on Nat. Geo. They also stated that too much pavement, too much development and narrowing of rivers with concrete contributed to the problems they had.

[stampeder]

It has to do with the soil in the area - it cannot handle those large amounts of runoff in such a short time. The glacial screed that underlies the thin soil doesn't particularly absorb or drain well, and also the permafrost is not too far from the surface. Building a sewer system to handle these few incidents hasn't seemed cost effective to the local politicians.

Also the rain falls in torrential downfalls in Calgary versus the continuous type in Vancouver or tropical monsoon areas.