First storm of the monsoon

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Blogger Dougo

As I was riding home in the school van today, I was discussing with a colleague and a teacher's son whether or not the black clouds to the north would bring rain. Pretty soon, we heard the first rumble and the boy began to count the seconds between lightning and thunder. The conversation turned to childhood memories of being terrified by the earth shattering boom of simultaneous lightning and thunder strikes. We all agreed that it hadn't happened very often. In fact, it had only happened twice in my whole life.

Tonight, I doubled this 5 times over. Rain came first. Then out on the balcony watching the downpour my feet began to be pounded by what I thought were hail stones. In fact they were fragments of hail stones smashing onto the railing. The wholes were as big as golf balls.

It was truly awesome. We left the balcony door open to take it all in and the sound of the thunder claps actually hurt your ears. It must have passed straight over the top of us. The photos I have uploaded were taken after the storm had passed to the south. There was no way I was going out even onto the west facing balcony with all the flashes and bangs going on. The wind meant that the rain and hail was coming in almost sideways. Being on the fifth floor of a five story building meant that any water that leaked from the roof came down the stairs straight under the door to our apartment. The crappy old ISD issue curtains proved to be effective sand bags.

What is it that we are always told when growing up? During a storm, don't talk on the telephone and unplug all electrical devices. When we moved into our building this year, I remember our neighbours telling us about a time last year during a staff party when the building got hit by lightning. People lost TVs, DVD players, laptops. Even those things that were plugged in, but turned off.

We were so excited by the scale of the storm that this advice went out the window. We lost our brand new Apple Time Capsule (a wireless router and 500 gig external hard disk) after the internet receiving tower on our apartment building got hit by a bolt of lightning, sending a surge down the internet cable plugged into the router. Our next door neighbours lost theirs as well, only it literally fried the power plug.

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Photos

Hail the size of golf balls
The crazy as patterns were mystifying

Building the dam
The horrid curtains we took down proved to be useful sand bags.

Hear me
The second photo in my 'Hand of God' series.

My favourite
I love this pic.

Spider web
Lightning does some amazing things.

Comments

[Isam]

I flew out on that night (29th) from Dhaka....it was scary