Everyone in OKC metro and areas south please take shelter now. These tornados are very hard to see as reported by the NWS. Several warnings up. This is a very volatile and dangerous situation. Take shelter with your emergency radio and dont come out until the all clear is given. Please.

3.5 inches now, but the skies are getting lighter.

Storms moving very close to me. Im leaving the reporting to the rest of you guys.

Stay safe everyone

Stay safe Erod.

Lisa, TWC showing flooded streets in OKC.

All of you are in my thoughts and prayers. This month of May has turned into a weather nightmare for sure.

Dawn

Dawn, the rapids were running outside my house. I took a bunch of pics, but I am not sure they really show it. Someone reported 11 inches of ran in El Reno. WOW.

I also took pics of my garden before the storm...just in case it didn't make it through :)

Looks like it will all stay north and west of me. North mostly, although Tulsa is still under a Tornado watch until Idnight.

A repeat of Last week. I will be praying for all the people in the City, deaths have already been reported. Its very sad.

E

This post was edited by Erod1 on Fri, May 31, 13 at 22:26

This OKC metro area storm is the most impressive single cell (or whatever it is called) I have ever seen.The size, power, and duration has been amazing.

Radar estimates of 6+ inches in 2 hrs in El Reno.

Scott, it has been impressive. There was anecdotal reports of 11 inches in El Reno. I think I'll stick with my 3.5 to 4 inches. My neighborhood doesn't have storm drains, the roads are basically our storm drains until the water reaches our drainage ditch. If we get very much rain, we have lot of trouble with flooding in the streets.

ABC Affiliate here reports that most of OKC received over 10 inches of rain. Our gauge only shows 2 and a half and I'm rural NE Norman. But we discovered this evening that we now have a lake front home. Surely the property value will go up enough to off-set the damage costs.

Bad attempt at humor......but what the heck else can one do? lol

My rain gauge says 5.75 inches, but the rain maps on tv this morning showed a lot of 10 inches across the area. I don't know if my rain gauge gave it up (6 inches is the top) or we just didn't get any more than that. I think I will go find a larger rain gauge today.

Lisa

Lisa, I think we got at least 8 inches here. My gauge has busted in a freeze but I'd left a tall kitty litter bucket outside and it is almost full. Our pool went up at least 4-5 inches then I went outside to pump excess off while it was still raining. This morning it's overflowing out one side, so we got another 4-5 inches overnight. Also, all the runoff from the yard carried tons of dirt into it so it's a nasty soupy pond today. We're so lucky that's all we've had - garden looks good, even still has mulch on it!

Oh Mia!!! that does not look like fun to clean out.

Lisa,I know the news said the mesonet recorded 8" for OKC, but the caveat was some areas could have received up to 11"+. I think we were at the top of the gauge. I've never seen so much rain or hail in my lifetime! The hail was not as large as in the 2010 storm, but there were just solid sheets of it, as though I was a Peeble or Weeble sitting on the ground and someone unloaded a dump truck full of crushed ice on top of me. And it just lasted forever!

Plants are pretty shredded, ripped, torn, broken, and drooping or on the ground. Plants fared much worse than the 2010 storm. They will eventually reanimated, hopefully, but the milkweeds, plus eggs, are in sad, sad, shape. Fennel looks pretty darn weepy, too. Lots of stuff just had their tops bent over or completely knocked off, including the butterfly bush, hibiscus, mountain mint, and so on. Seedlings of zinnias, cosmos and MGs were beaten into the ground.

The intensity, strength, and sheer length of this storm was beyond any I'd ever seen.

Susan

LIsa, I did see some radar-indicated rain maps that showed a narrow band of 10-11" of rainfall, so it wouldn't surprise me that people are reporting that much in a small area. It is a good thing it wasn't widespread at that amount or y'all would be floating down the road.

I am glad you took photos of your garden just in case. I don't do many photos, but whenever severe weather threatens I go out there and stand and take a long look at my garden, sort of recording a good memory of it in my mind in case it is about to be destroyed.

Scott, One thing I noticed was how fast they popped up. Dr. Forbes said those supercells went from zero to 57,000' tall (estimated) in about a half-hour. That sounds incredibly fast to me.

Paula, It was a good attempt at humor. I liked it. We can dig up our fishing dock from our pond that stays dry and no longer supports fish and bring it over there and install it on your lakefront property so y'all can go fishing with the grandkids. You'll have to supply your own fish, skeeters and water snakes though.

Lisa, All you need for a gauge is a kitty litter bucket like Mia's! (It is hard to find tall rain gauges. Most seem to stop at 5 or 6".)

Mia, That is an incredible amount of rain and I am impressed the mulch stayed where it belonged. I hope y'all use a pool service so they are stuck restoring the pool to its usual clear, sparkling water...so that y'all don't have to deal with it!

Susan, It was a crazy storm but, remember, Weebles wobble but they don't fall down. : )

I bet your hail fell at a really strong velocity to cause all that damage. I am sorry your plants are so damaged. It makes you wonder where the butterflies shelter in order to survive crap like that.

Maybe after you clean up all the broken bits and pieces, everything will look a little better and then will perk up and will regrow and, by the end of June, will be almost back to normal. Plants are so resilient and sometimes I think that seeing the damage hurts the gardener much more than the actual damage hurts the plants.

One amazing thing was this storm wouldn't die. I just kept watching the radar and saying "get out of there, go away" and more storms just kept coming from the west toward y'all, so not only were they not leaving very quickly, but new storms were backfilling behind them. I wonder if the outflow boundaries from the first storms were feeding the development of subsequent storms.

Maybe June will have calmer weather than the last half of May had.

Oh, and if anyone is wondering, Reed and his family are out of town so were not in the OKC-Edmond area when the storms hit.

Dawn

Oh, Susan!! I am soo sorry. I didn't have any hail here at all. Sharon said she had some, she's a few streets south of me. My garden looks good. I haven't been in the back, but the front looks fine.

I do sympathize though...last year's hail storms shredded my gardens, My hostas didn't look good for the rest of the summer. Let me know if I can help with anything.

I agree! The storm just kept back-feeding...on and on - I was really surprised to hear MORE rain through the night, but very glad to see sunshine this morning.

My rain gauge totaled 8" for last night (in The Village),

Sharon

Thanks, Dawn and Lisa, for your kind words. Oh yes, I realize the garden will regenerate with a little help. Sometimes I think storms are Mother Nature's way of pruning what I am not willing, don't want, or haven't got around to pruning yet. I have pruners, stakes, and plenty of seeds collected from last year's plants.

Susan