Yesterday I was at home all day studying, and staying out of the oppressive heat. For the last five or six days we’ve had clear skies and high temperatures. In the afternoon I noticed some dark clouds on the horizon, and after a few minutes it started getting dark outside. The temperature dropped 10 degrees suddenly, and I turned off the air conditioner and opened up all the windows in the house to catch some free cooling.
Thunder started booming in the distance, the sky turned even darker, and the wind started blowing pretty hard. I closed up the house in time for a massive thunderstorm to come through. I couldn’t see outside because the wind and rain was coming down so hard, but it was past our neighborhood in about 15 minutes. The weather stayed cloudy the rest of the day with occasional thunder, but it did stay cooler than usual.
We talked about it in my class last night and when I got home I saw on the local news that four people in Kobe were swept away in the sudden rush of water and were killed. They showed this video on TV – an animation taken from stills of a camera set up by the city to monitor floodwater levels. The video is pretty amazing – it only takes about 10 minutes for the flood to start.
