Weird Weather Sweeps U.S.

by Gordon J. Gianninoto

As many of you know, Janet and I live on a hill top. It is a mountain, but known as a hill, locally. We do get some wind up here. Well last Sunday night it started to rain and the wind picked up. But what was interesting was the amount of rain, the amount of wind, and the amount of temperature.

On Sunday the temperature was 44 degrees F and it kept increasing. Around midnight, the temperature reached 51 degrees F. Ok, you say, it was a little warm for the middle of December? But that was not all. The cold snap that enveloped the southeastern US brought freezing temperatures to the outskirts of Miami, which was 32 degrees. Cuba was 34 degrees! So when was the last time that in the middle of December, Maine was warmer than Miami, Florida by 19 degrees or Havana, Cuba, by 17 degrees?

I have lived in Maine for 25 and one half years, and two Aprils ago, we had my first Maine 9" rain, but on Sunday and Monday, we got our second on the Blue Hill peninsula. We had already had frost in the ground as deep as 12 inches in some places, but this 9 inch rain defrosted all of it. Of course, the temperature and the wind helped with that.

When we moved up here in the summer of 2000, that winter, in December or January, we had a blast of wind from the SE that I estimate at 165 mph which lifted up our house and pushed it back about 6 inches. We have no plumbing and the house is a slab sitting on sand. At about 1 in the morning, I heard a 'bang' and the south side of the house lifted up about a foot and the whole thing moved back, north, enough to leave a smooth strip of sand on the south side, and a 6 inch pile of sand on the north side. That interested me in getting an anemometer. After about 5 years, the cups broke off of it, but in that time I learned that we get 90+ mph four times a year, and 74+ probably two dozen times a year. Up until last March, we had not crossed over into the 100 mph or above area in a normal storm, but last March, I estimated that we got winds of 112 mph. Usually the wind is from the SE and we feel the gusts, having fields to the SE and the wind hits the trees on the NW of the house after it goes by us.

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