mappy

I won't lie, I thought at first a truck hit my building. Then when the second shake occurred, I just sat in my cube and went "awesome" while my coworkers are running out of the building.

anyways... back to irene...

THAT WAS AWESOME

Note to self: next time earthquake hits... don't be in a building in Baltimore

Wow, thank you for sharing that JoMo.

This. My mom, who has watched me become obsessed with the weather over the years, still doesn't know the difference between the two... no matter how many times I try to explain it to her. Also, the radio station I listen to during my commutes always mix up watch and warning when there is one for us. The last tornado watch we had, the radio host kept saying "and we have a tornado warning until 8pm". I wanted to call in and correct her, but didn't. As for those who don't take warnings seriously - a coworker from St Louis called me yesterday to tell me about her evening on Wednesday, how warning after warning was issued for the area and she said she eventually got tired going to the basement. She said she just sat in her living room and watched the news, heard about the baseball size hail falling in downtown St. Louis and laughed to herself about I would be upset that she wasn't taking the warnings seriously enough. I didn't get upset, but did voice my concern over how she really shouldn't do that because one of those times where she decides not to go to the basement is the time the tornado will actually be there.

I've heard that be described by people who have been through tornadoes before, the smell of fresh cut grass. JoMo - glad to hear that you are okay. Thank you for sharing your experience with us, and I'm sorry to hear that you lost people you knew.

Wow posted this earlier in the May 21-22 severe thread when someone asked about whether they heard from JoMo or not.

That is exactly what I was thinking! My husband, who also works in the GIS field, as done simliar KML maps for his company (a transportation engineering firm) and he has taught me a few things about KML as he learned it too. I keep hoping for some free time at work so I can mess around with it.

I agree with you on decimal degrees and you are welcome for the compliment I need to brush up on KML, play around with it some more. My mind is going crazy thinking of all the cool things you could with the data.

Well, from someone who works with GIS daily, it's a fantastic map! Have you worked with KML files (google earth) before? It would cool if you could take those storm reports points with the attribute data and export them to KML files so they can be opened into GE for people to view (Norman did that with the tracks, but didn't have anything you could click on).

Nicely done! Did you buffer out the width of damage along the line?

I'm sure some people read this but others may have not - Beau was able to get some information on JoMo's location over in the Central subforum. And then there was this Let's hope that is great news regarding JoMo and the neighborhood.

According to MSNBC, the death toll is now at 90

For all you know there wasn't enough time to put out a new warning with the dangerous part in it. That tornado dropped and grew in size VERY quickly, not to mentioned moved at 45mph. It's easy for people to make judgements on what the NWS should have done when its over and done with.

holy crap

Oh and I should add - in the top picture, the car to the far right in the front row that is practically buried, didn't move all week. It sat there through both storms, the plows and the shoveling of others and was never touched. We didn't see the owner of the car come out to investigate until that following Saturday.

Some pics: sorry for the backwards timeline... I uploaded the pics in the wrong order.

34 inches in Crofton which was the closest snowfall report to my location in Odenton, truly epic and amazing. My funny story to share is my husband and I going to the grocery store Thursday night. We didn't need the basics (we had gone earlier in the week before the news got serious about the threat) but we did want junk food and booze for the weekend. So here we are with our little cart filling up on cookies, chips/dip, fatty breakfast sandwhiches, ice cream, frozen pizza and appitizer meals while everyone else is clearing out the store of bread, milk, TP, eggs, fruits/veggies and meat. We are standing in line, our cart just a little over half full looking around at people with overflowing carts or even multiple carts just FILLED with endless amounts of the basics, like the world was coming to an end. We were given dirty looks, people were even making comments under their breath about how we were not going to survive the weekend on just junk food. It was incredible. The woman who rang us up at the register smiled and thanked us for not going crazy and giving her a small break from the endless amounts of purchases she had been ringing up for hours. We smiled and laughed as we walked out with our 60$ purchase of junk food while everyone else fought over the last gallon of milk. Cracks me up to this day how insane people got due to the storm. Only to see people back out again on Tuesday buying MORE food for Wednesdays storm.