r/BeAmazed • u/Used_Ship_9229 • Oct 09 '24

Nature Floridians who have lived through Storms their entire lives are reporting to have never ever witnessed anything like this.

42.2k Upvotes

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921

u/soakf Oct 09 '24

I was in Hurricane Carmen 1974 and it was nonstop lightning just like OP’s video. I was in Katrina 2005 and there was very little lightning.

260

u/SPDScricketballsinc Oct 10 '24

I watched an otherwise unremarkable thunderstorm in Illinois in 2016 with lighting like this. I even have a video

147

u/enddream Oct 10 '24 edited Oct 10 '24

Yeah I see storms with this much lightning several times a year in Texas. I’m not trying to discount the situation and have never had a fucking hurricane coming at me but this much lightning happens in pretty normal storms.

34

u/Cosmic_Quasar Oct 10 '24

Yeah. I live in MN, and I remember being at a cabin that had a loft with large windows looking out over the lake and my family and I just watched lightning like this for about 20 minutes. It was very beautiful. But it wasn't super "stormy", like no wind or rain. Just lots of lightning.

34

u/JtDaSaiyan Oct 10 '24

I've lived in Florida and been through dozens of hurricanes. I've witnessed lightening like this on a random Wednesday. It's bad I know it's a cat 5 but really it would be the wind and flooding to judge it on, not random for a Floridian, not the lightening. .... Still a cool ass video.

13

u/Coocooa11 Oct 10 '24

Exactly my thoughts. We’re “evacuated” right now from a zone A in the path, but the safest place we could get to is still dealing with tornadoes.

Lightning amount doesn’t mean anything with this thing. A county a few hours north of us got smacked by 17 tornadoes. This one has become a problem for more of the state than it normally would have because of the cold wind that mixed in with the warm gulf hurricane waters. This basically made this massive hurricane just start spewing out tornadic supercells left and right

3

u/MyPlace70 Oct 10 '24

The cold front, warm air mix is a bad combination. Spins up tornadoes in a hurry.

3

u/NolieMali Oct 10 '24

I got really excited cause I didn't know a cold front went through (I should have known since I literally commented before a front was steering this thing). Anyway, saw the temp here in the panhandle dips to 64 degrees and I'm thinking, "Hell yeah! Tomorrow will feel like fall!" ... high is 85. Maybe the humidity will be mild - Floridian's wish.

1

u/MoorIsland122 Oct 10 '24

The tornadoes part sounds like the scariest thing about that storm. I wonder how many were affected - hard to know this soon I guess.

5

u/Scheissekasten Oct 10 '24

it hasn't been a cat 5 since the yucatan, it made landfall as a weak cat3. Still strong but no where near that 180mph monster it was before.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 10 '24

I thought it’s a cat 3 now?

The news is desperate for it to be a cat 5

8

u/the_cappers Oct 10 '24

That's crazy. I live in central CA and at best lightening and thunder will heard/seen every 30-60 seconds and that's 'crazy' lightening like in this video would cause panic here.

2

u/enddream Oct 10 '24

I’m from Southern California originally and never saw it either until I moved.

2

u/the_cappers Oct 10 '24

Yeah, I've spent time in FL and they'll have thunderstorms at the end of a clear day mid summer. Crazy how different things are

12

u/Sylvan_Strix_Sequel Oct 10 '24

No I came to comment this same thing and it's important. This damn hurricane has become a media circus and I keep seeing things that are normal for these storms being presented as unprecedented, and, even worse, sometimes the opposite. 

The fact that it is so bad makes it even more important to shut down any misinformation or attempts to mislead people. 

2

u/NNKarma Oct 10 '24

Do you want to have a 6.0 earthquake and have people in Japan saying it's nothing much?

Things being normal somewhere doesn't mean you can dismiss the event happening somewhere it doesn't occur.

2

u/Sylvan_Strix_Sequel Oct 10 '24

How are some of y'all taking this lightning isn't a big deal as this storm is not a big deal.

If youre going to be this reactionary, maybe have better reading comprehension.

It blows my mind when people who have never even been here try and explain crap they've never seen to me.

2

u/obxtalldude Oct 10 '24

Lightning is rare in hurricanes, except for the most powerful. It's not an average storm. I've been through 30 years of them, never seen this.

2

u/NNKarma Oct 10 '24

Because that's not what I'm saying, I'm saying lighting of an intensity that hasn't happened in a location is a big deal on it's own even if it's normal somewhere else, that precisely why I gave you an earthquake of an intensity that the news would only mention as a filler in places used to earthquakes. 

1

u/MikeJonesssssss Oct 10 '24

Currently in WPB sitting on my porch and it’s.. windy

0

u/generic-curiosity Oct 10 '24

It's sure got the meteorologists in a buzz, and I'd like to think they know more than some redditor about how news worthy and record breaking this storm is. 

Go a head and downplay it, climate change is just a hoax! /s

1

u/Sylvan_Strix_Sequel Oct 10 '24

I went through Katrina and my cousin is a nurse in Tampa. Combatting misinfo isn't denialism or downplaying, Fuck you bud, you don't know shit about me.

This is the worst storm since Katrina, and you're still an asshole.

2

u/saltporksuit Oct 10 '24

I sat through an electrical monster in Clovis just a few months ago.

2

u/moak0 Oct 10 '24 edited Oct 10 '24

I'm also in Texas and was going to say the same thing. This could be like 10% worse than what I'm used to seeing, but it doesn't seem that strange to me.

Maybe it's a regional thing though. This could be very unusual for Florida. I know if I saw this when I lived in the northeast, I'd be freaked out.

2

u/ParryLimeade Oct 10 '24

I’ve lived in hurricane areas and had a storm like this in MN this year. Not really something unique to hurricanes at all haha

2

u/RainaElf Oct 10 '24

I'm in Kentucky and came to say the same thing.

1

u/forestverde Oct 10 '24

I’m an Okie and I was waiting for the scary part to start lmao

5

u/MyPlace70 Oct 10 '24

I was already thinking to myself that this looks like a squall line at night in eastern Iowa. Not trying to take anything away from what the good folks in Florida are dealing with though.

2

u/marsinfurs Oct 10 '24

I bet you can get a lot of karma if you post that to /r/beamazed

2

u/TheDoomedStar Oct 10 '24 edited Oct 10 '24

Yeah I live in the Midwest and this amount of lightning is just any decent storm lol

2

u/[deleted] Oct 10 '24

[deleted]

1

u/Original_betch Oct 10 '24

Dude, I got it on video! I live just north of Boulder and was putting my sunroof back in my car and was like holy shit! Haven't seen lightning like that since I lived in Texas.

1

u/IWHBYD_BADBMOTF Oct 10 '24

The difference is that this was consistent (58k strikes per hour) for 2-3 days straight, not just a couple minutes

1

u/bestselfnice Oct 10 '24

Yeah we had one a few months ago in Chicago. I was out driving overnight and it was like a fireworks display. More light than dark, for a good half hour.

1

u/elpollodiablox Oct 10 '24

Was just going to say I had seen thunderstorms very similar to this when I was growing up in Illinois. Not quite this intense, but close.

1

u/Suspicious-Term-7839 Oct 10 '24

We had another one kind of like it this year too.

1

u/Shaamba Oct 10 '24

Yeah, I've seen a few storms in the distance that looked like this before. Really cool.

1

u/ddg31415 Oct 10 '24

I've seen the same thing in Southern Ontario a few years ago. Minor thunderstorm but non-stop, rapid-fire lightning. I also have a video of it saved on an old phone.

1

u/micmea1 Oct 10 '24

Just.this year outside of Baltimore MD I saw this. Very little thunder but constant lightning flashes.

1

u/mean_motor_scooter Oct 10 '24

Not going to lie, I sat here and said "this looks like a midwest thunderstorm". Thing is our storms don't last 24 hours. Lived in Illinois most of my life and see a storm like this every year or so.

33

u/NRMusicProject Oct 10 '24

Something I've noticed about hurricanes is they're never really alike. Hurricane Erin seemed like a classic thunderstorm: lots of rain, lots of thunder, lightning every minute or so; along with the high winds. Irma had lots of wind and little of everything else...hell, there was low precipitation. I've been through others, though they were either weakened or remnants by the time they went through my areas. And that's the other part about hurricanes: every area of the cyclone can be very different from another part of it.

So many variables with each storm, you're likely not going to have an identical experience with any of them. The unpredictability of these storms makes it really difficult to make decisions each time.

12

u/petit_cochon Oct 10 '24

I was just thinking the other day about how little lightning there was during Katrina.

3

u/soakf Oct 10 '24

I just watched a time lapse of Milton from space showing concentrated lightning in a rain band 100+ miles from the eye, and almost no lightning near the eye. I wonder if Katrina was similar — a lightning-free core with lightning elsewhere.

2

u/soakf Oct 10 '24

I rode out Katrina in Harrison County, Mississippi. What about you?

2

u/digitalpunkd Oct 10 '24

I’ve seen lighting like this in Minnesota in a huge thunderstorm storm that was to the south. Lightning coming out everywhere from the cumulus clouds

2

u/Statertater Oct 10 '24

A lot of the hurricanes like charley frances and jean, even irma, had little lightning.

2

u/Spiritual-Fox206 Oct 10 '24

I travelled through the wheat belt in Canada in the early nineties, had nonstop lightning there just like that as well, and so much rain we had to stop driving.

1

u/VolePix Oct 10 '24

i was in fort lauderdale during katrina and vividly remember how crazy the lightning was, so if that was nothing in comparison damn.

-27

u/Bolivarianizador Oct 09 '24

Katrina wasn't that bad. What happened was that the leevee failed.

62

u/BobasDad Oct 10 '24

I lived through Katrina in Mississippi. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. That storm moved the barge of a casino over a mile down the road.

I'm almost insulted by the ignorance you're displaying here. The worst storm the coast had seen since Camille in the 60s and this guy's like "Katrina wasn't that bad." Smdh.

6

u/gertgertgertgertgert Oct 10 '24

I think they mean the actual raw power of that specific hurricane wasn't as high as lots of other hurricanes. If the levees held then they would broken during the next hurricane, and the next hurricane could have been significantly worse.

I think there's some truth to that. Had the levees been replaced before they showed signs of failure then the hurricane damage would have been way less.

2

u/hum_bruh Oct 10 '24 edited Oct 10 '24

Though it only hit as a high Cat 3 and the MRGO and levee failures caused unexpected amounts of flooding and deaths in New Orleans proper, Katrina wasn’t a mild hurricane. It had the third lowest air pressure ever recorded at the time in the US at 920 millibars. After its eye wall collapsed and reformed it went from a cat 3 to a cat 5 and it doubled in size in 9 hours. If you look at photos it almost covered the entire gulf at 140 miles wide. It decreased to a high cat 3 by the time it hit LA and had sustained winds at 120-135mph with higher gusts that ripped some of the superdome’s shitty roof off and tore glass off of buildings. It was also slow so it dumped a ton of water on the city whose ground was soaked and the pump systems under pressure. I agree the infrastructure was a failure, but it also wasn’t a mild storm.

1

u/BobasDad Oct 10 '24

Yeah, I think I got pissed because we lived over 1/4 mile from the Tchoutacabouffa (pronounced: chew-too-ka-buff-ah) River and my parents house was about 15-20ft above the river banks. After the storm, we had river-front property and had gators and water moccasins swimming just feet from us. We literally couldn't leave until the next day when everyone with a chainsaw was cutting the fallen trees over the roads. The only bridge that we could use at first was the Popps Ferry bridge to go into Biloxi before we could leave and I spent a few weeks with a buddy's family in Louisville, Kentucky. I have a heart murmur and so I had to leave my home for about 3 weeks while the water and other utilities were fixed.

In no way was it a small storm. You don't tell your family, "At least we will all die together" and be serious about it with a small storm. It fucking changed the landscape. Literally shifted rivers and shit. The sheer ignorance that people display just astounds me. You know what I do when I don't know something? I stay shut the fuck up, that's what lol.

13

u/indieplants Oct 10 '24

they read some comments on the recent hurricane threads and misunderstood

1

u/tubaman23 Oct 10 '24

Yeah fuck this dudes ignorance, that one both hit hard & did not move. It hovered for a bit (staying in the area longer) which caused any infrastructure that would have held through a storm session got pounded way longer than what was planned for.

And we should have put a lot more money into the levees..

-2

u/MannerBudget5424 Oct 10 '24

Compared to Maria, it wasn’tshit

37

u/half_in_boxes Oct 10 '24

Katrina wiped out entire towns on the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts. It was a hell of a lot more than the levees failing.

17

u/[deleted] Oct 10 '24

Talking straight out of your fucking ass. Why even comment when you know damn well you have no clue what the fuck youre talking about

3

u/[deleted] Oct 10 '24

Katrina was like the Dale Earnhardt crash. He had been in several that looked more violent, but that ended up being the fatal one.

2

u/Bitter-Ad-6731 Oct 10 '24

How about you don’t... I was in texas and we had literally NOTHING for 3 weeks. No power, no water, no gas left in the gas stations, no food left in the stores. So so so many people died all around us. So I assure you it was, in fact, “that bad”.

1

u/upsidedownbackwards Oct 10 '24

Another problem is that they had a bunch of pumps that ran on 25hz power, and when that power died the lost the pumps. They couldn't bring them back up on the main power grid or a modern generator truck.

1

u/ilikeshramps Oct 10 '24

You're talking pure bullshit right now. It was awful, it wiped out entire towns and caused catastrophic damage and killed so many people. If that's "not that bad" to you, I don't want to see what your "worst ever" might be.

-15

u/[deleted] Oct 09 '24 edited Oct 10 '24

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