Boom, boom, out go the lights

St. Louis was hit by some wild, wild weather last night: a storm that is being called the worst to hit the region in years, and which utility company Ameren calls the worst in a hundred years. At the moment, nearly five hundred thousand customers in the area are without power - one hundred thousand in St. Louis proper, your friends at Casa Waveflux among them. To compound the power issue, today is expected to be the hottest of the year so far, with temperatures approaching the century mark.

Last night introduced locals to the concept of a "gust front," which is apparently the meteorological equivalent of the blitzkrieg. Indeed, it was literally a "lightning war," with the kind of bolts from the blue (and into the blue, strictly speaking) that dazzled the eye and unnerved nearby residents.

Damage was simultaneously widespread and annoyingly scattered - that is, it was annoying if you happened to be one of the afflicted while others escaped unscathed. Einstein once famously said that God does not play dice with the universe. Einstein was a hack. Also a faithless adulterer, but that's another story. As M and I ate dinner in an unlit basement (chicken saltimbocca and salad), we listened to the guys on KMOX delivering incredible accounts of tractor trailers overturned on two of the three bridges connecting the city to Illinois with a wall section from a building fallen on the third bridge (and trapping an eight-month pregnant woman in her car in the process), shattered windows in the press box at Busch Stadium, a great Biblical wall of dust that engulfed folks downtown who were headed for the ballpark. Farther west in the city and suburbs, stories of fallen and broken trees were common, as were accounts of straight-line winds approaching low-grade hurricane status. In our neighborhood, KMOX reported (not yet verified) that a house roof had blown off its structure and onto a parked car. A hot time in the old town, indeed.

And, well, here we are. M and I counted ourselves lucky to have gotten by with only the one sizable tree limb fallen into our back yard. And the power's out, of course, and has been since 7:15 last night. M is home today; we decided that one of us should stay so that the windows could be open for the sake of our four cats. Better to have some air flowing than to seal up the house. Word is that Ameren will make restoring power to areas surrounding hospitals a priority. We live four blocks from such a medical center. Fingers are crossed.

Personal accounts from others may be found at the P-D's Weather Talk blog.

(Tempest tos't and cross-posted...)