I’ve had my own system for interpreting that "chance of rain" numbers that meteorologists use to predict weather. Along the lines of how people say eskimos have 137 different words for snow, here in Seattle, rain isn’t a simple yes/no thing. I wrote about it here a little while ago. The basic idea is that the % chance of rain is actually the % chance that a random person on the street would consider the current weather to be "rain."
I’ve also long believed that in Seattle it’s impossible to get over about 98% chance of rain because some die-hard hold out would always say "This ain’t rain. Back where I come from we have real rain and this ain’t it." Well last night I feel confident there was a 100% chance of rain. It was a full on storm. Things broke.
In one night we got a record 2.2" of rain with winds gusting to 74 mph. Roads were closed everywhere. Power flickered all night. Things banged loudly. My neighbor’s basement flooded because water was coming up through the drain! By work I saw a manhole cover that looked like a beautiful fountain with jets of water squirting up through the holes. My rug in my basement got fairly wet, as far as I can tell because of water coming down the chimney!! It was a bad time to realize that the last time I pulled my fileserver out to work on it I didn’t plug it into a UPS. Oops.
A couple friends and I wanted to experience the weather so we put on full snowboarding / mountaineering outfits and wandered out. We ended up spending a good chunk of the evening standing on a rooftop patio with a great view of the city, watching the city be destroyed. Explosions filled the night from lightning and transformers blowing. We could always tell which ones were lightning because the flashes were white and brief. Whenever a transformer would blow, there would be a pulsing glow that would linger for a second or two. They were also typically bright green, although we did see one or two redding purple ones. I’m pretty sure the green blasts were from large amounts of copper wire burning very quickly in a giant short-circuit. I’m not sure what metal they’d use in transformers that burns reddish purple. Occasionally we saw what must have been a whole substation go because the glow would last 3 or 4 seconds. For some reason we were cheering. After one such explosion, we saw all of Bellevue go dark, only to light up again half a second later.
It was amazing.
At some point we realized that the street’s own transformer was at eye level less than 20′ from where we were standing. When we finally connected the large explosions in the distance to the utility pole mounted bomb next to us, we decided to go inside. Show’s over. Don’t wanna die tonight.