Derecho? (Eastern US Storm)

[LadyTevar]

Sunday July 1, 2012
Type of storm a rare event for region
by The Washington Post


It's a hurricane. It's a tornado. No, it's a derecho.

Only a meteorologist was likely to have made the right guess about the violent storm system that hit the Washington area Friday night. Derechos occur only about once every four years in the District of Columbia area, according to the National Weather Service. They are more likely in the Midwest and Great Lakes, between May and July.

The worst news from the National Weather Service's website description: "Derecho damage to overhead electric lines sometimes results in massive, long-lasting power outages. . . . In the worst events, power may not be restored for many days."

A derecho is a fast-moving, long-lived, large, violent thunderstorm complex. By definition, it creates wind damage along a swath of more than 240 miles and produces wind gusts of at least 58 miles per hour.

Friday night's derecho raced along at speeds of more than 60 mph, with gusts clocked at 65 mph in Rockville, Md., and at 79 mph in Reston, Va. It formed west of Chicago about 11 a.m. and by midnight approached the Atlantic Ocean.

The trail of destruction more than fulfilled the definition of a derecho — it spanned from northern Illinois to the Delmarva Peninsula. To the north and west, 91 mph and 72 mph gusts were measured in Fort Wayne, Ind., and Columbus, Ohio.

Although the damage it can do mimics that of a hurricane or tornado, a derecho moves in one more or less straight direction. "Derecho" is a Spanish word that can be defined as "straight ahead," and was chosen as a counterpoint to "tornado," the whirling wind storm whose name is thought to derive from the Spanish word "tornar," which means "to turn."

Weather experts generally cannot predict a derecho as far in advance as they can other storm systems. Laymen who are not listening to weather reports can be left without time to take cover because the visual clues of impending danger, such as darkening skies, come at the last moment.

Derechos often form along the northern boundary of a hot air mass, right along or just south of the jet stream, where upper-level winds zip along at high speeds.

In summer, the jet stream atop a sprawling heat dome is sometimes called a ring of fire because of the tendency for explosive thunderstorms to form along the weather front separating hot, humid air to the south and cooler, drier air to the north.

On Friday, a historic, record-setting heat wave covered a sprawling region from the Midwest to the Southeast. Record high temperatures of 109 were established in Nashville and Columbia, S.C.

In Washington, the mercury climbed to 104 degrees — the hottest June day in the 142 years that records have been kept. The temperature broke previous records set in 1874 and 2011 by two degrees.

As stifling air bubbled northward, clashing with the weather front draped from near Chicago to just north of Washington, storms erupted. They grew in coverage and intensity as they raced southeast, powered by the roaring upper-level winds and fueled by the record-setting heat and oppressive humidity in their path.

The coverage and availability of this heat energy was vast, sustaining the storms on their 600-mile northwest-to-southeast traverse. The storms continually ingested the hot, humid air and expelled it in violent downdrafts - crashing into the ground at high speeds and spreading out, sometimes accelerating further.

This derecho event is likely to go down as not only one of the worst on record in Washington, but also along its entire path, stretching back to northern Indiana.

The intensity of the heat wave, without reservation, was a key factor in the destructiveness of this derecho event. It raises the question about the possible role of man-made climate warming from elevated greenhouse concentrations — a question that scientists will surely grapple with in case studies of this rare event.

[Pelranius]

Were you guys out in Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland ok?

DC wasn't hit too bad (at least NW).

[Thanas]

Derecho? Is there a translation for that term into english?

[Force Lord]

Derecho? Is there a translation for that term into english?

Literally "Derecho" means "Right" in English, but I'm sure in this case there may be a different word.

[Sea Skimmer]

The word can mean more then one thing, in this case its being used for its meaning of 'straight', reflecting the nearly straight line approach of this type of storm. To classify as one it needs to have a mostly straight front, damaging winds at least 240 miles wide, and a sustained period of wind gusts over 50 knots. I'm very glad I was only on the northern edge and escaped the wind, though not epic lighting. 1.9 million were still without power in the US this afternoon, peak was 5.2 million and I think that's based on number of specific customers, not people.

[Simon_Jester]

Just got power back today after a sixty-hour outage.

[basks in renewed air conditioning]

Yeah, the DC area is having some trouble coping. A LOT of the suburban areas' power lines run through or along wooded areas, so when trees start falling down you get mass power outages very quickly. They usually compensate by bringing in crews from other states when there's bad weather they can see coming for a few days (like the occasional remnant of a hurricane that makes it this far north). But this time, it blew up quickly and there wasn't a lot of spare manpower, so you just have the local utilities' own crews working umpteen hour days in 90-100 degree heat to patch everything up.

My hat is off to them.

[Lonestar]

I'm at work and we're STILL on the generator here. Added fun: The fuel gauge on the generator is broken so the contractor isn't topping it off, so we keep losing power and generally being helpless to the organization we support.


Good stuff.


God PEPCO sucks big fat floppy donkey dick

[Broomstick]

Derecho? Is there a translation for that term into english?

Derecho is the English word for that type of storm. English mugged Spanish in a dark alley and took it out of Spanish's left pocket. Definition given upthread.

As noted, this sort of thing is more common where I live, in the Midwest, which is why our building codes (depending on what you're building) insist that the structure withstand 130-160 kph winds. If I recall, that's the level of a class two hurricane, or even skirting into class three - we just don't get the days of rain + storm surges that accompany a classical hurricane. That's also why, on the news, the local authorities from the worst-hit areas are talking about hurricane levels of damage. That's also why damage is worse on the east coast even though the very same derecho barreled through my area as well (and we still have about 75,000 without power in the greater Chicago area, which extends into the very south of Wisconsin and into northwest Indiana, as well as some localized flooding so we're hardly unscathed). West Virgina doesn't, to my knowledge, have building codes requiring the same level of wind resistance as Illinois or Indiana because for the most part they just don't get the high winds we do. They don't get hurricanes, either, as a general rule.

[Simon_Jester]

What really screwed over the East Coast area that got hit seems to be the structural weakness of the power grid. Trees falling on people's houses and other direct physical damage was a factor, trees falling across roads was a minor inconvenience, but the mass power outages turned it into a regional crisis.

And this is the same problem we have with hurricane remnants when they actually hit, too...

Do you have more buried power lines or fewer lines running right by big stands of trees in the Midwest?

[Andras]

I was out of power for only an hour and half. There are still 478 customers in my county out of power, but that's down from several thousand a couple days ago.

Fortunately I live in the middle of the largest concentration of customers for my utility so we are the priority in getting power back.

[Executor32]

What really screwed over the East Coast area that got hit seems to be the structural weakness of the power grid. Trees falling on people's houses and other direct physical damage was a factor, trees falling across roads was a minor inconvenience, but the mass power outages turned it into a regional crisis.

And this is the same problem we have with hurricane remnants when they actually hit, too...

Do you have more buried power lines or fewer lines running right by big stands of trees in the Midwest?

Both, depending on the area. My town (Rochelle, IL) is surrounded by farmland, so trees are few and far between, and when they are next to power lines, the utility companies cut branches off to give the overhead wires a wide berth. The county seat, Oregon, is mostly surrounded by forest, so there's a lot of buried power lines there.

[Skywalker_T-65]

Before the tornado, my town (Joplin, MO) didn't have a whole lot of power lines next to trees. Those ice-storms we had a couple years back knocked out most of the ones that were next to trees, and the tornado handled most of what was left. I don't know how many are buried, but I would assume a pretty good chunk of the more important ones are, considering how the weather is around here.

So yeah, the Midwest is more used to storms that threaten powerlines, so ours aren't normally built in big strands of trees (some near my house are in the middle of some woods, but the power company cleared half a blocks worth of trees away from them on either side).

[Col. Crackpot]

Derecho? Is there a translation for that term into english?

Literally "Derecho" means "Right" in English, but I'm sure in this case there may be a different word.

True, but in this context Derecho means something along the lines of straight ahead.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Were you guys out in Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland ok?

DC wasn't hit too bad (at least NW).

Yeah, power was knocked out in almost the entirety of WV, Virginia, and large swathes of Ohio. Power went out Friday night and didn't come back until roughly Sunday morning. In my county the city was going to turn off the water at 3PM EST Saturday because we didn't have enough electricity to work the pumps, thankfully they re-routed some power so that wasn't necessary. I had to go across the street and play bouncer for the convenience store my mom works at because the girls working over there were swamped with people trying to come in, I had a couple assholes try to jump the line outside and a couple trying to get ice without paying and other than that no problems in that department except assholes demanding exact change. I had a pine come down on two other trees knocking large branches off and I had to help my neighbor clear out an oak tree that uprooted and nearly crushed him when he was coming in from mowing his fields. That was all done by about Noon, so I just went swimming in the creek for the rest of the day.

[Raj Ahten]

This storm also managed to knock out 911 service to my county and an adjoining county. Apparently the storm disabled primary and backup power for the system and also caused hardware and software damage. It still isn't back to normal yet. Sounds to me like whoever designed the system fucked it up big time. For a couple days officials were saying "we don't know why the system went down or what is wrong with it." As usual, systems fail when they are put under strain.

Here's a Washington Post article on it

After storm, 911, phone service remains spotty
By Patricia Sullivan, Published: July 2

Fairfax County’s 911 emergency center operated at just half capacity Monday as Verizon struggled to figure out why both its primary and backup power systems failed after Friday night’s storm and left much of Northern Virginia without 911 service through the weekend.

Callers with medical and safety emergencies caused by soaring temperatures, power outages and downed electric cables received either rapid busy signals, recorded messages saying the line was inoperative or dead silence, even after Verizon’s service was restored, local officials said.

The loss of power from both primary and backup systems, according to Harry J. Mitchell, Verizon’s director of public relations, damaged the company’s computer hardware and software and caused other mechanical problems in a chain reaction that has perplexed and alarmed state and local governments.

“It is understandable that something like this could happen, but shouldn’t there be some redundancy or backup to keep 911 up and running?” said Sharon Bulova (D), chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. “It’s not acceptable for the region’s 911 system to go down.”

Bulova and other elected officials are asking the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments to set up an investigative task force.

Corey A. Stewart (R), chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, called the 911 outage “shocking” and “unacceptable.”

“I just hope no one lost their lives because the 911 system was down,” he said.

Mitchell said Verizon is restoring 911 service piece by piece.

“Once we complete our restoral efforts, we will investigate fully the causes of the problems and provide a root-cause analysis to the appropriate officials,” he said in an e-mail. “The powerful storm appears to have caused problems on multiple layers of facilities, from the commercial power failure to damage to our backup power supply, to downed and damaged lines. The combination of those factors led to issues with various aspects of the 911 system.”

Regular 911 service was restored Monday in Manassas, he said, and Verizon was again beginning to successfully provide the addresses of all 911 callers to Fairfax County. “We are testing that with Fairfax County now,” he said.

When the system is functioning properly, computers route all incoming calls to authorities in proper jurisdictions with callers’ addresses. If problems are experienced routing calls to one jurisdiction, the system is then supposed to route them to neighboring ones. But this function also failed over the weekend in most of Northern Virginia, except Alexandria and Loudoun County, which are serviced by different networks.

So far, no one has died because of the lack of 911 service, thanks in part to the extraordinary efforts that local governments made to alert residents by radio, television, Web sites, Facebook, Twitter and neighborhood e-mail lists, local officials said.

If residents couldn’t get through on 911, each government provided non-emergency numbers. If those didn't work, residents were advised to flag down a police officer or firefighter, or walk to the nearest fire station for help. Several dozen people in Fairfax stopped by or called fire stations, the majority for non-emergency matters, Dan Schmidt, a Fairfax fire department spokesman, said.

The 911 outage began late Friday, after the rain and windstorm swept through the area. Calls to local 911 centers in Fairfax, Arlington County, Prince William, Falls Church, Manassas and Manassas Park trickled to a stop. Verizon notified emergency responders about 6 a.m. that the power outage that shut down so much of the region had also affected its Arlington-based facility, and its backup system had also failed.

On Monday, 911 service was improved but still wasn’t back to normal, local officials said. For a while, 911 operators could not making outgoing calls. Regular land lines and electronic communications, such as e-mail, were not as reliable as they normally are.

“I’m sorry to say we still are not fully restored,” said Steve Souder, director of Fairfax’s 911 Center. “We are getting some 911 calls, at half the capacity of what it normally would be.”

Jack Brown, director of Arlington’s Office of Emergency Management, who was worried about the combination of heat, lack of power for air-conditioning, non-operating traffic signals and erratic 911 communication, suggested canceling Fourth of July celebrations.

Terrie Suit, Virginia’s secretary of Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security, said she will organize a working group of state and local officials, telecommunication and cable companies to address repeated problems statewide with 911 centers during extreme weather events.

“We need a long-term fix,” said Suit, who jumped into the issue at the request of Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R). “We’ve had 911 issues during hurricanes, during Irene. . . . We’re all impacted when there’s a major storm, no matter who the vendor is. We’ve got to get to the bottom of this.”

In 2011, Maryland’s Public Service Commission criticized Verizon for failing to inform communities when 911 calls failed to go through. At the time, Verizon pledged to alert county 911 centers of phone problems within 15 minutes.

Apart from the 911 outage, cellphone service across the Washington area remained spotty Monday.

AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon all reported that they are working to get generators to sites that have lost power and repairing storm damage as necessary. Customers have reported being unable to make phone calls and, in some cases, also reported text message outages. AT&T and Sprint said technicians were working long hours to restore power and conduct repairs. T-Mobile said Monday that about 85 percent of the network’s cell sites were running.

Comcast and Cox Communications both said their companies can’t completely restore service until customers have power and can determine whether their cable and Internet connections are also damaged. Fallen trees and branches have knocked out some cables across the region. Those issues will take longer to repair.

Brookland resident Tony Taylor’s phone dropped half a dozen calls as he made his way out to Bowie to check on some property. Though cell service was spotty Saturday and Sunday, he couldn’t make any calls or use text messages for several hours.

The outage forced Taylor, who stopped land-line service in 2008, to rely on backup prepaid phones to conduct business.

“For the last several years, I’ve been used to having a cellphone on the go,” he said.

According to a 2011 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly one-third of all American homes no longer have a landline.

The Federal Communications Commission works with carriers on best practices for 911 call center operations for such issues as taking calls from Skype or similar voice-over IP services.

But 911 centers work with states on how to reroute calls in case of outages. If companies do not adhere to these best practices, the agency can put out a public notice asking carriers to adhere to their agreements more closely.

In cases such as this, the agency analyzes data it receives from the carriers to determine if they need to follow up on any issues.

After Hurricane Katrina, the FCC tried to make a regulation that would require telecommunications companies to provide enough backup power for eight hours at all cell sites. After a lawsuit, the regulation was struck down when the government ruled that the FCC did not provide enough public comment on the law. The agency has since suggested reopening the issue.

Catherine Caton of Clifton said she is furious with Verizon, her telecommunciation provider, which won’t give her a date when it expects to fully restore her home phone service.

“It confounds me that they are held to a different standard,” she said. “They have an obligation to provide service.”

The 911 outage delayed Prince William paramedics from getting to a person suffering from a cardiac issue over the weekend, said Jason D. Grant, a county spokesman. Grant said the caller reporting the emergency got a busy signal initially but eventually got through.

Instead of the normal three- to five-minute response, it took emergency crews about 10 minutes to get to the patient, Grant said. The patient had a pulse upon arrival at the hospital, Grant said. Additional details about the patient’s condition and the incident were not immediately available.

Jeremy Borden, Caitlin Gibson, Justin Jouvenal, Cecilia Kang and Hayley Tsukayama contributed to this report.

[Simon_Jester]

Both, depending on the area. My town (Rochelle, IL) is surrounded by farmland, so trees are few and far between, and when they are next to power lines, the utility companies cut branches off to give the overhead wires a wide berth. The county seat, Oregon, is mostly surrounded by forest, so there's a lot of buried power lines there.

They cut branches here too, but fat lot of good that does when the wind kicks up enough to break mature trees in half. Though it does help keep down the minor outages we used to get after every other thunderstorm back in the '90s.

[TimothyC]

Here's a nearly 20 meg gif of the storm as it showed up on the IR loop:

http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/blog/wp ... o_anim.gif

It really puts this even into perspective. The cloud tops here are about the same temperature as you get in hurricanes. The storm was also the size of a small tropical cyclone - it just moved a lot faster.

[LadyTevar]

The majority of WV's powerlines are all above-ground. It's just not cost-efficient to bury them, so they string them along roadways. The problem? Roads follow creek bottoms, or are dug out of the side of the mountain. Set powerpoles into the side of the mountain, and anything falling from higher up the mountain can hit and block it. Take US Rt. 60, for example: In 11 miles of road, there were 8 trees across the road where they fell from higher up the mountainside and fell on the wires and the road.

High-tension wires and power stations are not that much safer. They string along the ridges and valleys (again, easier than burying wires), and then get hit by high winds and topple. On top of a mountain. Where the access road is blocked by half a forest. Or worse, it's the tower that was built tilted in the first place to hang out over a cliff-face and stretch to the other side of the creek/holler, where the matching tower is also tilted to catch the wires and send them on the way.

As for "Building Codes", we really didn't have that much building damage other than tree/branch falls. No building has been reported as knocked down by the winds. However, WVians aren't USED to Tornado-force winds at all. The mountains break up the formation process, although a few tornadoes do spawn in wide valleys or flatter plateaus. They are never big tornadoes, rarely travel more than a football field (if that), and break apart rapidly. The Derecho's straight on, hard-hitting wind was something we'd not seen in over decade. Hell, I forgot the last time we had one (April 1991). It just faded from memory.

[LadyTevar]

Here's a nearly 20 meg gif of the storm as it showed up on the IR loop:

http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/blog/wp ... o_anim.gif

It really puts this even into perspective. The cloud tops here are about the same temperature as you get in hurricanes. The storm was also the size of a small tropical cyclone - it just moved a lot faster.

Jesus Frak!! It's really scary to see the BlackPart as bigger than my STATE.

[Broomstick]

I want to thank the crews that came down from Canada to help out with restoring the power grid in the hardest hit parts of the US. Once again, Canada is the best sort of neighbor to have.

[Phantasee]

We're still feeling guilty over torching Washington. Sorry again.

[LadyTevar]

We're still feeling guilty over torching Washington. Sorry again.

Pity you can't repeat that little trick....

[Lonestar]

We're still feeling guilty over torching Washington. Sorry again.

You laugh, but the District and Maryland are spending a lot of money on War of 1812-related events.

[Phantasee]

So is the Harper Government (née Government of Canada).

[Vashon]

Was wondering what else that heatwave did. All I was caring about was how hot it was going to get last week and thevweek before.

Building a boathouse and slapping on metal roofing. Got a nice farmers tan. And monies. And a lesson on how heavy those trusses are.


Wonderful. Anywho, we didnt get any rain and blistering heats and so the place looked dead in parts. Everybody ok though? Heard about two dozen people are confirmed dead.



I guess this is 2012s big thing. With the last two years being tornadoes and the South freezing over.