Well, for those who think Denver is a quiet little cow town, a couple of
nights ago, between about 8 and 10 PM, we had a couple of huge thunderstorms
roll across western suburbs. It rained really hard for quite awhile and the
wind was pretty strong, too, but in some areas, the hail was ping pong ball
size and literally got to be two feet deep in places of the western suburbs.
Yep, you heard me right, two feet. I was listening to the ham radio reports
from that part of the Denver area because it just rained hard here where I
live but about 20 minutes northwest of where I live, they had to call snow
plows out to clear the highways of all the hail. My youngest sister lives 5
minutes west of my house and today she told me they had windows broken out,
hail inside the house, the roof damaged, their gutters torn up, tree limbs
broken off and laying all over the place, and her flower garden was
pulverized. A neighbor, she said, had 17 windows broken out from the hail.
On the news this afternoon, I heard a man say he made 14 individual trips to
a dumping area in Lakewood, which is across the street from me, Lakewood,
that is, to completely clean up his house and yard from the storm. That's a
lot of mess. More than a dozen years ago, probably closer to 18 or 20 years
ago, there was a storm like that in northwest Denver that did 611 million
dollars worth of hail damage. Some reports claim this will be worse. Sandy
works part time answering calls and making appointments for a mobile vet and
one lady she talked with can't find her little dog because before she could
let him back in the house, the storm suddenly blew up and the dog is now
missing. Of course, that happens a lot in storms. We got 32 inches of snow
on the level one year about 5 years ago and I shoveled off our deck so the
dogs had a path to get into the backyard. I shoveled all the steps off and
then shoveled a wide area of free space at the base of the steps because the
snow was too deep for all of our dogs. After letting them all back in one
day, Sandy called me to come and find Zippy. He was a dachshund and not
very big. He had worked his way into the deeper snow piles up and gotten
stuck under the steps so I had to go and fish him out. Fortunately, this
winter storm of 32 inches was in mid April and the next day it was 50
degrees and the snow melted by the end of the week.
Phil.
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