This was originally published in The Emerald City of the South, a Little Rock paper that sometimes came out three or four times a year. It references some of the severe weather Little Rock experienced on the fateful night of January 21st, 1999. It also references local past weather that has no bearing on you, reality, or those twinkies you forgot you hid under the bed.

 

THE OLD HOUSE DOCTOR 3-9-11

STORMY WEATHER 101

 Funnel cloud near Mayflower, Arkansas, the last one whut I ever tooked a pitcher of

Remember 2009? It was the coolest year on record, with the most rain ever recorded in central Arkansas. How about the summer of 2010? One of the hottest years to date. And though I haven’t seen the statistics, I’ll bet this winter was one of the coldest and snowiest.

My conclusion?

The weather is out to eat you alive, and you’d better be ready for spring.

Some of you may know that I am a stormchaser; this does not make me any money, but it does make me a weather-informed individual. You should be, too, because like it or not you live in Tornado Alley. Little Rock may not be Oklahoma City, but we certainly get our share of the severe stuff, and the season has already started. I will forgo my admonishments and normal tongue-clucking mock-superiority (mock? Surely you jest!) to give you a primer on severe weather.

Some of you may remember January 21^st 1999; that was the night of the downtown tornado. It is reported that over seven hundred homes in the MacArthur Park and Governor’s Mansion Historic Districts were damaged (more if you look outside the Districts) and many hundreds were destroyed. It still amazes me that only three people died that night, but there had been a lot of warnings all afternoon, so I guess we were as ready as we could have been.

I am also not alone in my opinion that the tornado was, in some ways, good for the downtown. Those who lost loved ones or property will undoubtedly disagree, but I speak of the downtown as a whole. The trees that came down, magnificent as they were, were going to do so one at a time; old willow oaks are known for weakening as they hollow out. Everyone got new roofs, the streetlights increased threefold, and people learned to plant more willow oaks as opposed to Bradford Pears or silver maples, neither of which are good in the long run. Maple root systems heave sidewalks and foundations, and Bradford Pears, outside of a few weeks in the spring and fall, are rather dirty and boring trees. They are also weak, prone to splitting, and they don’t tend to live as long or give as much shade as the traditional white or red oaks.

There are several things I’d recommend to old-home dwellers regarding preparation for storms, much of it gleaned from what I saw that fateful night twelve years ago. Other things I have picked up along the Chasing / Restoration Road.

My backyard on Center Street was filled with record albums, furniture, and memorabilia that had been, minutes before the tornado, quietly residing in people’s attics. The attic is the most readily - damaged part of a house in a tornado; you should stash your most important documents, photos, and sentimental junk in closets on lower floors.

Windows were smashed and broken all over town, as flying debris is the number one cause of damage in a tornado. But many of the windows that didn’t get broken allowed water to flow under them in the sideways rain that pummeled us from the southwest. This is always a good reason to get up on my soapbox and tout the effectiveness, historic value, and “greenness” of covering your original windows with storm windows. I know you think that replacement windows are better, but they are not. Yes, they may have a slightly higher R-value, an  there might be tax credits available, but storm windows preserve your original fabric as well as protect it from anything short of missiles. If your home is on The National Register of Historic Places (or you hope it someday will be), you cannot always replace those windows. And if you really want to be green, think of what manufacturing replacements and disposing of the old windows takes. Go with storms. Be sure to properly glaze and paint your old windows first.

Go out in your yard and look for tree limbs that endanger your house. Not just the dead ones, either. Eighty per cent of the storms in The Rock come out of the northwest, west, or southwest, so think about how your tree might fall when they do. Remove dangerous limbs before the storm drops them through your roof, and pay particular attention to any limbs overhanging your main electrical line. I can’t tell you how many meter loops and breaker boxes I have to reattach to homes after storms  have detached them, and it almost always runs near a thousand dollars.

If your downspouts (you DO have gutters, don’t you? They are CLEAN during storm season, aren’t they??) drain to an underground conduit, make sure the drains are not clogged. Otherwise the water backs up to the gutters, overflows, and tears them right off your house. After flooding your eaves, of course.

Know where to go in your home during tornado warnings; if there is no basement, designate a central hallway or interior room in which to ride out the storm. Tiled bathrooms are often good choices due to the plumbing and reinforced walls. Keep flashlights handy and a weather radio with fresh batteries on hand. A local portable radio is also a good idea.

If you want to keep up with the weather via your computer, add these sites to your favorites list. Stormchasers and weather weenies alike use them.

www.intellicast.com

This has the best radar with the most detail. Explore the site and learn to use the ‘pan and zoom’ feature.

www.spc.noaa.gov/products

This is The Storm Prediction Center, run by NOAA. It will tell you many days in advance of approaching systems and how dangerous they are. Meteorologists, chasers, and weenies live by their predictions. It updates every seven hours. Keep informed!

http://weather.unisys.com

Unisys is the site I use for basic weather forecasting, and it must be pretty good, because pilots and other flying types depend on it for their flight plans.

So, keep informed, get a plan and a weather kit together, look at your trees and gutters, and consider storm windows. And if you get rain blown on your porch, sweep it off immediately, otherwise you’ll be calling me to fix it when it rots. And you don’t want that, now do you, precious?

Got a question, a gripe, or want to take me to dinner? I can be reached at king.oldhousedoctor@gmail.com.