What does 100 km/h wind speed mean to you? By Cruel Elevator in Cruel Elevator's Diary Wed Apr 23, 2003 at 11:45:52 AM EST Tags: (all tags)
	...about 62 miles / hr for the metric impaired, yeah, but what happens when you get hit by a storm with wind speed of 100 km/h? I found that out yesterday, the hard way.

So here was I, browsing the web, and listening to some junk music through the headphones. The headphones do a nice job of reducing external sound and I was pretty absorbed in whatever I was doing. This was about 8.30 pm. Then, the lights kind of flickered, I thought I heard somebody shouting "who left the bloody windows open?" Went out of my room to investigate, and found my family frantically trying to close all doors and windows. I gave them a hand and managed to seal the apartment without loosing any limbs. Wasn't easy though. Then the storm hit. Was an impressive sight... the term "Screaming Wind" actually does exist. When the wind hits your building and makes it's way through tiny openings (our apartment isn't air tight, and I don't think it should be) it makes this menacing whistling sound, and you get this feeling of impending doom. The power went out, and the inverter (battery backup system) kicked in. We actually thought that our windows are going to break open, goats are going to fly in, and we are going to be flown out. Nothing like that happened but some of our furnishing (partitions and such) got ripped off from our terrace and got delivered to our neighbors. The cat was scared shitless and didn't know where to hide. The apartment shuddered as the winds hit. Storm lasted for about half an hour, followed by rain, which leaked in through the terrace and seeped into our rooms. Looks like we need a better drainage system - the drain inlets got jammed by debris flown in. The city looked like a disaster zone after the storm was over. Lots of trees were uprooted. My girlfriend was out on a dinner and she got stuck in the road for an hour because uprooted trees were blocking the roads. The storm had knocked out the power supply in most areas. Not only that, in the airport, two airplanes, which hadn't been properly anchored, slammed into each other - they won't be flying anytime soon. Most of the billboards are gone or displaced. Strangely, nobody was killed. Power returned at about 4 am in the morning... we had a blackout for 7 hrs I guess. It went out again this morning at about 10 for maintenance work (the trees had to be removed). Returned after 5 hours, and it'd gone out again at 6.35, for two hours. My inverter is screaming mommy. Hopefully it'd get enough power from the utility grid to recharged by tonight. Two passenger carrying mini-steamers faced a storm the day before yesterday. There were about 400 people in them, and both of them drowned. So far, about 200 dead bodies have been recovered. Facing the storm in a well built apartment was pretty scary - I wonder how'd it be to face it in a steamers, right in the middle of a very deep river. I don't intend to find out. I can't swim. Even if I could, I don't want to find out.

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