Oh Hail....

MONSTER storm last night capping nearly a week of rain. This was well after the main storm had passed and seems to shave been an unrelated summer thunderstorm.

Hampton Roads was not hit nearly as bad as the northeast we still have 4 inches of water in some Portsmouth streets. There was lots of pea to marble sized hail, which is quite the awakening experience in a mobile home :)
The pickup of peril was flooded and my yard is now chock full of limbs and debris washed down the street and into the woods behind me. Fortunately my singlewide castle of banality is elevated high enough that it was unwetted.

Some easily repaired damage, but I did lose a bit of skirting from some large tree limbs scraping by the house as they collected at the bottom of the hill in what must have been 4-6 feet of water! That skirting is going to be awkward to replace. There is much yard work to do but there is still standing water (That didn't even happen that in this yard after Floyd and Isabel) My folks in Portsmouth have 6 inches of water standing in their back yard and the streets in Merrifields were still half full of water as much as 4 inches deep at 11:00 this morning. There was consdiderable damage to Hampton from hail and wind.

Compared to the nightmare that gripped the Gulf Coast last year and the awful floods elsewhere this week this is piker stuff, but I'm very concerned that the ground throughout SE Virginia is supersaturated now, even worse than it was before Isabel. That CAT-1 storm did damage out of all proportion to its strength due in part to the soggy ground allowing far more power lines and trees to fall over than normal.

We are expecting the storms this year to follow the pattern of the thirties meaning more east coast hits. It is well to remember that the 1933 storm was the most damaging storm to hit this area since colonial times.