It's a bit wet over here...

[morsla]

Apparently I'm crazy for running outside to photograph the storm...

aeliel: Where's your survival instinct?
morsla: It's a species survival thing. If I can serve as a warning to others, I've done all I need to...

There is water cascading down the (internal) stairs outside our door. Four levels up, water is pouring out through the light fittings and smoke detectors: the roof cavity must have flooded, much like the road.

More behind the cut.






And some pictures of hailstones...



I'm fascinated by the cross-sections of shattered hailstones - they show all the growth periods, where the ice has been flung higher into the clouds. Some of them have five or six growth rings in them, and are as big as a 20c piece.

Comments

[mstakenidentity.livejournal.com]

I didn't realise how close to me you lived!

[morsla.livejournal.com]

Which street are you on? We're right on the corner - I took those photos from our balcony, just above the flooded footpath.

[mstakenidentity.livejournal.com]

We'e on Birch lane, it comes off Stockmans Way, right near the little park wich apparently was under water, so our ground floor flooded somewhat :-(

[vass]

Those hailstones are amazing.

[mousebane.livejournal.com]

As awesome a sight as that was, it shredded a lot of my garden! Accursed gods.

Tried to show Will the hail too, but he slept right through it and it had pretty much all melted by the time he woke up.

[morsla.livejournal.com]

We still have snowdrifts of hail, piled up in our garden bed... I'd offer to put some in the freezer for him, but he probably wouldn't see it as any different from regular ice cubes :)

[harkon.livejournal.com]

We were in the city when the hail started and for some weird reason, most of the hail wasn't even vaguely spherical. A bunch were roughly cubish, others were a little more rectangular, but the most scary were the ones that were wedge-like ones - they were basically daggers that came down and smashed violently against whatever surface they hit.

[umbra-mentis.livejournal.com]

Bah, self-preservation is for the...umm, weak but living? Nice pics :)

[mc-shamo.livejournal.com]

Hi,

I'm mstakeidentity's fiance (just so you know I'm not a random troll...). I drove in when the water was at its highest, and had to come in via the service station. It was nuts. We live just around the corner, and the water got up high enough to seep in underneath our front door :(.

[morsla.livejournal.com]

Hope you didn't get too much water inside the house. Our stairwell got flooded, and now the whole thing smells like mildew...

We had a bit of water come in under the front door, which seemed a bit strange as the door is at the top of some steps. Turned out that the rain had been coming in sideways, hard enough for the runoff to come underneath the door.

[fetnas.livejournal.com]

What the hell am I'm coming home to? Looks like chaos!

[morsla.livejournal.com]

It's back to sunshine again today.

Wait, raining again.

Hang on - back to sunshine. I'm sure that on average, things will be back to normal by the time you arrive at Tullamarine :)

[fetnas.livejournal.com]

Well it's snowing at the base of Mt Fuji where we're at the moment, so that sounds like a decent upgrade to me ;-)

[hespa.livejournal.com]

they show all the growth periods, where the ice has been flung higher into the clouds

o.0 I have an image in my head now of hailstones bouncing around in the clouds like pinballs... Is that accurate?

[morsla.livejournal.com]

Pretty close... they get caught on updrafts and sent back into the colder layer to grow a bit more. If the conditions are right, then you end up with freakishly large hailstones by the time they finally drop out of the clouds.

I kept some in the freezer :) Though I've seen a few photos on Twitter of golfball-sized hail, so I'm glad that we got the slightly smaller variety...