A Perfect Storm

Last night, we got ripped by a storm like I've never seen before. Everything was calm at 5:00 PM, but 3 hours later, when we took the dogs for a walk, it was lightning like crazy to the east and south. The pic above (no, it wasn't taken by me) gives you an idea of the first wave of the storm. All that light to the east isn't from twilight and isn't from the lights of Phoenix. It's from a gazillion cloud-to-cloud lightning bolts.

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The sound was incredible. For more than an hour it sounded like a jet plane landing or a freight train going by. What it really was, was constant thunder. I've never experienced that before. The dogs were naturally freaked.

By 10:30 PM, the electrical storm had pretty much passed. That was followed by one heckuva "normal" monsoon storm, where all the lightning is cloud-to-earth. Once again, the dogs freaked.

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Somewhere around 3:00 AM, yet another cell of thunderstorms passed thru. You know how you can "count" to five for every mile away that a lightning strike is? Forget about it. I didn't even get to a-thousand-and-one. By now the jack russell was bouncing off the walls.

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Ironically, it turns out we got off relatively light. The brunt of the storm passed to the north of us. There were all sorts of knocked-down trees and flooding as we commuted to work today. We'll close this post with a pic someone took this morning.