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A remarkable, perhaps historic storm system, is currently approaching our forecast area. Impacts of concern through tonight: - Severe thunderstorm wind gusts (greater than 80 mph) as storms move through west/central/north Oklahoma and parts of western north Texas - Severe (post-frontal) westerly winds gusting to 60 mph following the line of storms - Significant tornadoes and significant hail produced by severe storms as they track across northwest, west, west-central, southwest Oklahoma and portions of western north Texas (snip)... ...Everyone should have a safety plan in place by now, and by this evening: + People located in mobile homes should urgently...

As an extreme weather event stampeded across South Dakota Thursday evening, images that emerged on social media called to mind the 1930s Dust Bowl era. A destructive line of storms rips across Nebraska and South Dakota on May 12, leaving damage scattered all over the region.(Please go to the site to view the video)The multi-day severe weather threat across the Plains escalated on Thursday, with thunderstorms delivering powerful winds and massive hailstones across the region a day after a meteorologist was killed in a crash during a preceding storm. The extreme weather event has been declared a Derecho, a long-lived...

A derecho, otherwise known as a widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm, is expected to traverse parts of the Midwest Wednesday night and early Thursday, according to The Weather Channel. Derechos can cause hurricane-force winds, tornadoes, torrential rains, and flash floods. This one could wreak havoc in the areas shaded in purple below. What’s important to note is that this derecho is sweeping across the corn belt. A Moderate risk for severe weather remains forecast for much of the state of Wisconsin. Damaging winds (some 75+ mph) are the primary threat this afternoon and evening. Very large hail and a few...

A devastating derecho ripped through several Midwest states on August 10, 2020, leaving a path of destruction, more than 1.5 million customers without power, and more than 404 600 hectares (1 million acres) of destroyed or damaged crops. Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini described the event as one of the worst weather events of 2020 in the United States. The storm ripped through the heart of the Corn Belt - a region of the Midwestern United States that has dominated corn production in the country since the 1850s, with winds gusts up to 180 km/h (112 mph), causing...

Severe weather will lash through areas from the Midwest to the Great Lakes into Tuesday, hitting some of the major cities in the United States, including Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit.

Ingredients are coming together across parts of the Midwest and Ohio Valley that could potentially trigger a derecho on Wednesday into Wednesday night. While it isn't exactly a certainty whether or not a derecho will form, some of the cities and towns most at risk include Chicago, Ill.; Columbus, Ohio; Fort Wayne, Ind.; Aurora, Ill.; Dayton, Ohio and Davenport, Iowa, to name a few. Strictly speaking, a derecho is a widespread, long-lived wind storm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms. These showers and thunderstorms produce wind damage over a large swath of land. While...

Some two weeks after Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta warned of a potential “cyber-Pearl Harbor” involving a possible attack on the electric grid, Mother Nature took the cue and hit the East Coast with a storm that left millions of us for days without electricity from the grid. Some said silent thanks for that old generator they’d thought to stick in the garage. Though it wasn’t a cyberattack, but Mother Nature gave parts of the grid a good lashing anyway. On my country road south of Annapolis, two transformers were blown down from their perches on telephone poles, and...

The week had been difficult enough for the Weinberger family after a rare derecho storm knocked out power to their Bethesda home for four nights and an enormous oak tree had been toppled by the wind into their roof. And that was before a heavy duty crane tipped over in their yard. “We had a lovely driveway, a beautiful lawn you could host Wimbledon on,” said Lauren Weinberger with a laugh, as she chatted by phone on Sunday.

<p>Triple-digit temperatures expected to feel as hot as 110 degrees have prompted excessive heat warnings across the D.C. area on Saturday and could threaten all-time highs.</p> <p>The day continued a trend in the area that hasn’t seen high temperatures lower than 95 degrees since the month began.</p>

Safe to say most Washingtonians had never heard of a "derecho" before June 29, when one of these speedy and destructive windstorms ploughed through the capital, leaving behind dead bodies and battered homes and more than a million households without power. Now the storm is over, and one can expect this obscure meteorological term to pass just as swiftly into everyday speech. Exotic, vaguely menacing, and evoking senseless, abrupt calamity, "derecho" is an especially apt description of America in the age of Obama.Like the homeowners in Fairfax County, Va., picking up felled tree branches and putting in insurance claims,...

Adding to Brother Rat’s ongoing storm narrative and also using his bullet(s) point format……. BULLET: Blown away? Like many of the other OSS staff and contributors my family was at ground zero for the surprise fast moving linear windstorm that started in northwest Indiana and spread out like a flood across Ohio, northeast Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia. Washington DC was especially hard hit. My prayers go out to all affected. The storm sped across 700 miles in 12 hours through the Midwest, north Appalachian, and mid-Atlantic states. At peak impact, over 3 million households were without power. The storm...

For all the talk of incivility in the Nation's capital, the last week has restored my faith in the basic decency of the people who live there. Although the storm that hit Washington and the surrounding area June 29 has not received as much national attention as hurricanes, tornados, and other natural disasters usually do, the human toll has been high. In the Washington metro area alone, five people died in the storm and more than 20 have died subsequently from the heat, as hundreds of thousands suffered days without electrical power. But through it all, most people have behaved...

My observations will be preaching to the choir in this forum but here goes: · Gasoline was gone within 24 hours. Lines were just like the 1970s fuel embargo. · Ice became the chief commodity and was in short supply or no supply. · Water was out for most people at least for the first two days. · Most big box stores and gas stations were up on generator power by day three. · A new shipment of 250 generators was sold in a few hours. · Temperatures in the high 90s added another layer of difficulty.

Utility crews made significant progress Tuesday restoring power to homes without electricity since Friday night’s storm, but officials in several jurisdictions announced they were canceling Independence Day celebrations as the recovery continues. Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley said Tuesday morning that 75 percent of outages in Maryland had been restored, while Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell reported that power outages in Virginia had been reduced to a fraction of the 1.2 million customers left without lights and air conditioning in the wake of the storm. As of 5 p.m. Tuesday, about 13,000 of 257,000 Pepco customers in the District were still without...

WASHINGTON (AP) - In the aftermath of storms that knocked out power to millions, sweltering residents and elected officials are demanding to know why it's taking so long to restring power lines and why they're not more resilient in the first place. The answer, it turns out, is complicated: Above-ground lines are vulnerable to lashing winds and falling trees, but relocating them underground incurs huge costs - as much as $15 million per mile of buried line - and that gets passed onto consumers.

Derechoes have been in the news in Washington as of late. No, that’s not some new breed of super bureaucrat, but it is something from a supercell sized thunderstorm that crossed several states during its lifetime. You may have seen this NOAA image already on a  few news websites:That’s a time lapse radar image capture as the storm progressed from near Chicago to Chesapeake Bay.They’ve been known over a century, and around far longer than that. Wikipedia says that Derecho comes from the Spanish word for “straight”.The word was first used in the American Meteorological Journal in 1888 by Gustavus...

D.C. Council members planned to meet face-to-face with officials from Pepco as soon as Tuesday to address the “unacceptable” pace of the utility’s recovery efforts after Friday night’s fierce storm swept through the region and left hundreds of thousands without power in stifling heat. Their stern response to a third day of widespread outages builds on years of skepticism aimed at the utility that serves nearly 800,000 customers in the District and Maryland. Several city lawmakers could empathize with their constituents’ plight, because they, too, lacked power in their homes. They wondered aloud whether Pepco gave “short shrift” to the...

(Reuters) - A powerful storm hit the U.S. capital on Friday, downing trees with wind gusts of up to 79 miles per hour, topping hurricane force levels and knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of homes in the Washington area. Bands of rain lashed the city and winds toppled power lines and littered the streets with tree limbs as the fast-moving storm, which started in the Midwest after a day of severe heat, reached Washington and its suburbs late in the evening. WTOP radio said more than 800,000 people in the Washington area were without power. The Washington Post...

A fast-moving line of dangerous storms knocked out power to more than 1.5 million customers in the D.C. area Friday night. A day of record-shattering heat ended with severe thunderstorms that rushed through the metro area with strong winds and an impressive lightning display. The storms produced hurricane-force winds in excess of 80 mph. Gusts of 82 mph were reported in the Reston area. On Saturday morning, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management confirmed that four people had died due to the storm in the Commonwealth. The National Weather Service reported a tree fell on a car in the area...

Devastating thunderstorms Friday left nine people in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia dead and hundreds of thousands without power in the region as residents across the area face more extreme temperatures and the possibility of additional thunderstorms this weekend. According to the Associated Press, the storms were blamed for the deaths of six people in Virginia; two in New Jersey; two in Maryland; one in Ohio; one in Kentucky; and one in Washington. More thunderstorms were expected in the D.C. area heading into Saturday night, and triple-digit temperatures were forecast for Sunday with highs expected to reach 100....