Wayback to 6/19/1992

My photo scanning efforts keep taking me back into the past. One of the sets of photos that I scanned, this morning, reminded me of an event on 6/19/1992: a huge hailstorm. The following entry is from Wikipedia.

19 June 1992

Wichita, Kansas, USA

Two batches of severe thunderstorms, occurring within 6 hours of each other, dumped hailstones up to 4.5 in (11 cm) in diameter across Sedgwick, including the city of Wichita, and surrounding counties in south-central Kansas. Over 10,000 homes were damaged. The hail left wheat fields in a near total loss. Estimated property damage totaled $500 million with crop damage at $100 million. The thunderstorm episode ranks as one of the worst ever to hit Kansas.[7]

Back Story

In early 1990, our son-in-law, WichiDude, contacted me to let me know that Cessna Aircraft (for whom I had worked 1975-1981) was hiring engineers. At the time, although Hunky Husband and I had remarried in 1988, I was still living in Albuquerque, NM (working in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA) while HH was in his 32nd year with Boeing. By late March, I was making the long drive from San Francisco to Albuquerque, pausing a bit in Albuquerque to process out of my job there, and making the long drive from Albuquerque to Derby, KS. I put in my (2nd) first day of work at Cessna on 4/9/1990. Well and good. HH and I were once again stuffed together into the house in the that we had had built in 1968 - which he still owned and had continuously occupied since that time.

Life is not that simple. Came May, 1991, Boeing sent HH to work in Philadelphia, PA. Fine lot of good it had done me, moving back to Kansas! The hailstorm hit while HH was working in Philadelphia.

Although I normally worked on the west side of Wichita, on the day of the storm I was working on the east side. Thus, my brand new 1992 Ford Taurus SHO car did not take the brunt of the hailstorm as did tens of thousands of cars that day. [The SHO required only the replacement of a small strip of weather stripping on one window - a $100 charge.] For years following the hailstorm, cars drove around our area of the country looking as though they had been systematically beaten with a ball pean hammer.

When I drove home from work a few hours after the storm it was a different matter. The streets, sidewalks, and yards of Derby looked as though they had received a few inches of green snow. The hail had shredded and beaten the leaves to a pulp, mixing them in with the ice of the hail. Some of the streets had been plowed and most of the ice had melted by the time I drove home. Below are more photos of our yard from that day.

In the photo, below, my tire tracks were made after the kind, younger couple who lived across the street (their house is shown in the photo) helped me clear the tangle of limbs that had blocked the drive.  (That kind gesture rather injured my feelings since I was a mere 54 years old at the time and felt perfectly capable of clearing the mess, myself. Rest assured, however, that I accepted their help graciously. Now, 29 years later, I would jump for joy at their help.)

The grass was surely green, but the photo (below) does not show it. The green on the ground in the photo is shredded leaves from our big, old trees. Note that our creek, running between our green yard and the house in the background, is high enough for the water to be seen. I take it that the lawn mower belonged to, and was in the yard of, our nextdoor neighbor. Our mower was in our shed.

Many of the trees along the banks of the creek lost limbs. The creek was overflowing, not only from the amount of water that resulted from hail melt, but also from the clogging of the waterway produced by downed limbs and trees and other debris from the storm.

I'll wind up the post by embedding a video shot during one of the storms that day. The video runs about five minutes, but only gets informative at about 50 seconds in. It appears to me that the videographer was fortunate in missing the brunt of the storm. (Street/highway signs make it easier to follow his path - if one is familiar with Wichita.)

"This video is part of the Tornadoes Kick Media stock video collection from Tony Laubach. To license this footage, please contact Tony Laubach at the email below or through YouTube or Facebook."

 

NOTES:

1. At the beginning of the day, all of the trees around our neighborhood were fully leafed out. It was the stripping action of the hail that bared the trees behind our house in the top photo.
2. In the same photo, to the right of the driveway and above the sidewalk one may see a patch of bare dirt. That is where I had a large maple tree removed just a few weeks before the hailstorm. It had suffered major damage in a windstorm.

Comments

[Liz Hinds]

Wow! That was some storm.

[bogie]

Ah, the old house. I remember the maple in the front yard (the one you had taken out shortly before the hail storm).

[Cop Car]

Liz--It was, indeed.

Bogie--You may not recall that, the large maple in front, a silver maple, and the two large silver maples in the back yard had started out as mere saplings. Doug & Lynn Stone had them growing along their driveway (on Woodlawn - 1968) and wanted rid of them. With our mostly barren yard (except for the trees along the creek), we were only too happy to have them. The saplings were probably about six feet tall and an inch in diameter at the time. The red maple and sugar maple trees in the back yard were gifts from your grandparents H. Mom had called our builder for the name of a reliable nursery, then called Hillside Nursery to order the trees and plantings for us. The red and sugar maples grew much more slowly and were not damaged by the storms. The silver maples, being fast growers, took a beating.