How's your weather treating you?

We are unseasonably hot and dry

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Hitting 90 in May is not unheard of, but to only have 18% humidity is crazy dry. Usually I'm waiting for the garden to dry this time of year, now I'm watering portions of it while tilling other parts. No chance of precip in the 10 day forecast.
 
We had almost 3 straight days of overcast and drizzle, but in our area I don’t think we got more than .1 if that much. Better than high fire danger, red flag warnings.
 
We just got over a half inch in about 2 hours, hope it keeps up through tomorrow. All total we got a little over 3/4" Thurs night - Friday. Not enough to change the maps but anything helps.
 
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We've been in severe drought for a while now. That is up till last week. Now we are out of drought status for the first time since last year

The green smudge near the bottom is where I live. To orientate you, the mostly white drought free county is Harris County, where Houston and its 7 million citizens live.

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We aren't in a drought yet, but it is advancing on us. A week ago the yellow abnormally dry area was confined to NE Illinois and doubled in size in a week. We are in Warren county, with the blackened border on the west side of the state

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As of noon, we are sitting with 9" of rain over the last 10 days. This mornings rain brought 2" so far. Even worse is it also brought estimated 80-90 mph winds.

Those winds didn't hit us - no damage here, but hit Monmouth just a few miles north and west of us. That's also where our power feed comes from. Power lines and trees down, lots of old buildings in the down town area lost roofs, brick fascia, etc.

Winds also derailed a freight train less than 10 miles away. Some are saying might have been a small tornado, but don't think so. It was carrying double stacked intermodal containers and looks like it was just blown over.

Bottom line is our power is out and no telling when we will get it back on.
 
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We had about the same thing last week. In about a 6 to 8 square block area, we had some very high winds and trees and limbs were down as well as the electricity was out for a couple of days. At least I've had some practice dealing with that lately and it wasn't 4 degrees.
 
What a mess!
Yeah, Monmouth is an " old" town with lots of brick buildings in the downtown, and mature trees throughout. Coupled with power distribution exclusively above ground and you have a mess. It's the county seat, but only 8500 population, so it's a small town. From pictures, it was mostly on southern side of town, so hoping they can quickly get main distribution lines running which would get us power back. No major damage outside of town.
 
Saw a truck sitting at the substation down the road about 30 minutes ago. Figured it was there to switch power back on once the main lines were powered. Sure enough, just got power back. :yipee: only about 8 hours off.
 
Here is a short video from a drone of the train mess. Going to be slow to get it cleaned up, soil is saturated and anything over land will be fighting the mud. They've got emergency contractors and will bring rail based cranes to clean and rebuild track. It took out both rail lines.

In addition, those are the same lines that Amtrak runs from Chicago all the way to Los Angeles. Going to be a couple days before that run is open.

 
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