What the BLAP?!? I Leave Town for a Few Days and THIS Happens?

This weekend I visited the University of California-Berkeley to see just what their graduate chemical engineering program has to offer. Answer: a lot of well-funded, well-equipped labs full of people who are very excited about what they are doing. That includes both grad students and professors. Also, beautiful campus scenery--lush forests (probably redwoods) standing right there, between buildings. And of course, there’s the matter of their superlative reputation. But as it turned out, the visit wasn’t the most interesting thing to happen that weekend.

Waiting in the Denver airport on my way back from Berkeley, I received a phone call from my mom. She had news of some sort of high winds disaster in Lawrence Sunday morning. Maybe it was tornadoes, maybe just high winds. The information wasn’t exactly clear. She also had some unclear reports of shingles or roofs or pieces of roofs coming off of KU buildings and maybe no classes on Monday.

I was quite concerned, so after finishing that conversation, I called my flatmate, Magic Steve, to ask what was up. He reported that our house was fine and, in fact, most of the town was fine, but our house also didn’t have electricity. Sure enough, classes were cancelled for Monday, and yes, there were pieces of trees down everywhere. But at least I could stop worrying about my residence.

As I later learned, Lawrence was hit Sunday morning by a microburst, which apparently is a region of high (as in, 70 or so mph) winds that can form at the base of thunderstorms. Don’t feel bad if this is Greek to you; I certainly had never heard of this, the ball lightning of windstorm phenomena, before Sunday. I still don’t really understand what it is. And actually, my house had a little damage--one of my windows blew out. But mostly the storm just brought us a day off from school (probably only the third time classes were cancelled in about twenty years) and a night of that odd sense of togetherness and cooperation that only shared natural disasters can bring.

If you want to know more, the Lawrence Journal-World did a much better job of covering everything than I could.