Storm of the Decade

The past few days we have had unusually heavy storms culminating in one last night that China Daily is calling the Storm of the Decade. I have lived through my share of thunderstorms in my life, even a few tornado warnings in Missouri, but none of them were in any way close to what we went through last night. It started late last night, around 11 and got harder and harder in intensity until about 4am this morning. Some students who got caught out in it were showing off bruises that they got from the rain. Yes, it can actually rain so hard that you can get bruised. The thunder and lightning were the worst. It was nearly fully light in my room from the constant lightning and the vibrations from the deafeningly loud thunder were so bad that it caused a lot of the alignments on our projectors to go askew. (As a result, the students were floored when I told them that Hansel had a sister after watching literally half of the fairy tale.)

I was told by one student that 30 minutes after the rain started to really pound down, it was past their ankles. Given their penchant for exaggerating, I believe the depth but I think it probably took at least an hour to give 3-4 inches of rain. According to a Chinese news service, the city officially received 35 millimeters of water. According to Google, that's 1.37 inches. So either someone's exaggerating, or someone's covering up. Whatever, I'm used to both by now. However, it has also been raining and storming the past few days. Here are a few pictures.