Derecho Blasts Northern Plains With 100 MPH Winds, Leaves 2 Deadead

Accuweather.com ^ | 5-13-2022 | Adriana Navarro

[blam]

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 thunderstorm complex that is sometimes called an "inland hurricane" due to the extensive wind damage that often occurs. According to the Storm Prediction Center (SPC), there were 55 significant, hurricane-force wind gusts. "[Thursday was] the day with the 2nd most preliminary hurricane force wind gusts since at least 2004," SPC said.

Furious winds roared across the Plains Thursday with wind gusts over 100 mph tearing across states from Kansas to South Dakota to Wisconsin, taking down power lines and trees, kicking up walls of dust and even rolling semi-trucks.

"It was very forceful, very dark, it was very quiet up until the wind hit. Almost instantaneous, tree branches, and roof shingles and stuff started coming off structures," Arlington, South Dakota, Fire Chief Trevor Keating told AccuWeather Meteorologist Tony Laubach in an interview.

(snip)

[.44 Special]

I would rather several Herboobs ripped through her dress.
She pointed a pair of 38s at me then she pulled her gun.

Do you rekon all of these dust storm will result in a new dustbowl. Are we likely to to see a new Okie invasion of California.

Like Grouch said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

[norwaypinesavage]

Yes, they are straight line winds, sort of like a horizontal tornado. Here’s an article about another one that hit Minnesota a couple of decades ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_Waters%E2%80%93Canadian_derecho

They’re not that uncommon. My sister experienced two in one summer several years ago, one in Minnesota and the other in Maryland. The Minnesota one knocked over a tree onto our parent’s house.

[Fresh Wind]

Pierre Derecho...wasn’t that Mitt Romney’s secret twitter handle?

[stars & stripes forever]

Romney’s alias - Pierre Delecto.

[KC Burke]

I spent a week in the Boundary Waters area about a month after that event. The number of trees blown down was beyond count. It was an incredible event to view.

Going up and spending most of my life in Kansas and Missouri, I have experienced a half dozen of these storms to one degree or another. I remember one that hit about 7 AM and looking out the bedroom window as I had been dressing to leave for work, it looked like I was in a submarine. — said water piled against the glass. The wind was in the 80s and 90s for about 20 minutes — it was not like a tornado due to the duration alone.