Snowgates Demonstrate Practical Wisdom of Public Services

Mr. Ehrisman's passionate advocacy of snowgates and our weekend winter wonderland got me wondering why Madison's public works department doesn't use snowgates. My dad, a font of local wisdom, tells me that Madison once upon a time did install snowgates. The innovation came at the urging of Harvey Rhoden, who worked for the city.

Personal digression: I knew Harvey as "Grampa Rhoden," not because he was kin, but because he and his wife babysat me when my mom worked at the college. Grampa Rhoden was a big, round man whom I remember as deeply tanned from being outdoors running heavy equipment all the time. His cigar habit may have imprinted on me a fondness for the aroma.

Harvey's snowgates worked great, Dad says. But the city didn't like them, because they slowed down the work. The snowplow drivers were on the streets longer, and the city had to pay them more. So, says Dad, the snowgates didn't last.

Dad and I had this conversation as we towed his skidsteer from one of his rental units to another to clear the snow ridges from the driveways. We saw plenty of other people applying their own shovels and snowblowers to the hard, chunky walls of snow sculpted across their driveways by the city plows. Madison only had three inches of fluffy snow, so clearing steps and sidewalks was a breeze. The skidsteer made clearing the driveway a snap as well... if you consider gassing up, loading and unloading, and maintaining personal heavy equipment all year long a snap. Without the skidsteer, I guesstimate clearing a typical snowplow driveway ridge might take ten minutes with a good metal scoop shovel. And that's a light snow.

Now multiply that effort by a couple thousand households. Calculate a GDP equivalent. Say a couple thousand people expend that effort. 2000 people × 10 minutes × $10/hour (your time is worth at least that much, isn't it?) = $3333. Add in a few dozen broken plastic shovels, gas for snowblowers, the investment in skidsteers and trailers made by a few wildmen like my dad....

Compare that with the cost of centralizing that snow removal as a function of local government. I'm totally speculating here, but suppose six snowplow operators have to spend three more hours lifting and lowering snowgates to keep our driveways and sidewalk egresses clear. Suppose we pay them twenty—heck, thirty bucks an hour (that's cold, crappy work). That's $540 above current costs. Add equipment and maintenance....

Snowgates remind me of the discussion we had last year about closing drivers license stations last year. When government spends less on certain services, it often shifts costs to individuals. We pay less in taxes but more in personal resources, and more folks are left out. Dad has a skidsteer and truck and trailer to haul, but the old lady down the block has felt boots and a plastic shovel. I suppose if we had some Christmas spirit, we'd have just run the skidsteer dry clearing every driveway we could for free... but what kind of socialism is that?

Even Dakota War College agrees: we'd be snowed without good government services. Government can provide some centralized services more efficiently than private efforts can.

Now, about that single-payer health care system....

Metrodome Joins Vikings in Collapse

Holy cow! The Metrodome collapsed!

Hubert H. Humphrey Metrobowl, Minneapolis. The inflatable roof collapsed due to the weight of snow from this weekend's blizzard, which had dumped 17 inches on Minneapolis by Saturday evening. Image from KARE TV via CNN.

I say get out the utility knives, remove that roof, and play real football ball in the snow! Or just leave the roof where it is, rig up some ski-lifts, and let the kids sled in the Hubert H. Humphrey Snow Bowl all winter.

Lake Herman Ice Check: Seven Inches!

For lunch, I stepped out of the office and chopped a hole in the lake.

Punching holes in Lake Herman: another guy compulsion

About twenty feet from shore, the ice on lovely Lake Herman was a whole hand thick, at least seven inches. Ever-reliable Dad reports he saw someone drag a shelter out to ice-fish over the weekend. Cross at your own peril!

And how was your lunch break?

First Freeze on Lake Herman

Lake Herman was still wavy yesterday, but it settled down enough overnight to freeze:

Don't drag out the ice shack just yet: that's at best a quarter inch of fine, smooth slush. But with below freezing temps until Saturday, the ducks and geese may have to put in overtime to keep open patches for themselves over Thanksgiving.

Weather Report from Lake Herman: Wet!

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it... other than shooting YouTube videos! John Nelson on the east side of Madison reports four inches last night alone. Here's the view from Lake Herman of our prairie monsoon season:

Part I: The Driveway—Too Much Water



Part II: The Boat Ramp—Conservation of Gravel and Energy



Part III: The Yard: Gophers Afloat

Eye of the Storm -- Blink! Rain, Rain, and More Rain

I made it to town between downpours. In the Mundt library, I missed most of the second gullywasher of the afternoon, oblivious in my earphones. The rain broke just in time for my sanitary district meeting.

I stepped outside, looked up—hey! This isn't a hurricane... so how come this storm has an eye?

The rough rainy grey moved in fast to close the gap.



Downtown, folks parking by the Stadium Grill needed galoshes:
The storm drain at North First and Egan was still playing catch-up on gullywasher #2:

Thirty minutes later, that corner was dry.

As I raced the dark, on-rushing front home, I found more water. Lots of water in the ditches headed for the lake, big water on the golf course... oh yeah, and someone's black Angus grazing in the ditch south on 451st (glad I didn't meet him in the dark! Come get your livestock, neighbor!). And then there was all this water by my house:


This isn't my current driveway; this is the gravel trail down to our old cabin and the fishing point. Splash splash—hardly need to get out of the car to fish. We also have a minor stream running across our front yard. What fun!

The black clouds raced overhead, then boom! Big northwest wind, and the heaviest rainfall of the day. Time to check the sump pump... where'd I leave that hose?

T-Minus 24 Hours to Tonic Sol-fa -- Come to Madison!

24 hours from right now, The Su Fu Du Drumline will be rocking Trojan Field, warming up the crowd for Shelter Fest's headliner, a cappella superstars Tonic Sol-fa. If you haven't picked up your tickets yet, get down to Mochavino in downtown Madison and do so! $15 a pop for some really good music... plus you'll be helping the local Habitat for Humanity chapter put another family in a good, safe, sturdy home.

And if you're not in Madison, well, get here! Come tomorrow, buy your ticket at the gate, and come have a good time.

Madison weather forecast: raining right now, but breaking up in the west as I type. Tomorrow's forecast: wet in the wee hours, chance of t-storms through lunchtime, then, by showtime at 6:15 p.m., partly cloudy, 79°F, and east wind at a tickling 2 mph.

Shelter Fest! Get here! You'll love it!

Climate Change: Watch out for Angry Grandkids

Hot enough for ya? Meteorologist Paul Douglas notes that June was the warmest month on record. Not just the warmest in proximity of my or Bob Ellis's overheated blogs, but worldwide. That's four straight months of record global warmth, and 304 straight months with global temps beating the 20th-century average. This data isn't just one hot week or, for the paid deniers, one month of blizzards, says Douglas:

The trends are apparent to anyone taking the time to really look at the science. No one heat wave, month or year proves anything, but what we have here is a steady trickle of evidence, a gradual accumulation of coincidences that can no longer be denied. Melting glaciers, thinning arctic ice, rising sea levels, an uptick in drought and 1-in-500 year floods are all symptoms. The earth's atmosphere is running a mild fever. The question: do we believe the doctors and treat the patient now, or wait for those symptoms to worsen? It's not ideology, it's not a political litmus test, it's not a "new religion." It's basic science [Paul Douglas, "Thursday Flood Risk (and the most severe 30 days in Minnesota history?)," Minneapolis StarTribune: On Weather, 2010.07.21].

Douglas echoes the sentiment of The Age of Stupid, the speculative documentary the SDSU Sierra Club showed in Brookings last December, when it was awfully cold out. Douglas says a few words about the need to take responsibility for our energy consumption habits that ought to send a chill through the conservative obstructionists who love talking about personal responsibility on every other issue:

Our grandkids are going to be pissed. They will hold us accountable for sitting on our hands, bickering with professional scientists—waiting, hoping for a magic cure or "more evidence." ...I was taught that actions have consequences. We've been binging on oil, coal and natural gas for 200 years, most of the greenhouse spike in the last 50 years. This week China just surpassed the USA as the greatest producer/user of energy on the planet. Think we have a problem now? Just wait 10 years. You haven't seen anything yet [link mine; Douglas, 2010].

So, Senator Thune, keep fighting energy responsibility with every fiber of your being. Then be sure to eat well and use your government health coverage to live a long and happy life... so you can be around to explain to our grandkids why we wrecked their ecosystem and burned up all the easy fuel.

Rainbow and Lightning: Thunderstorm over Lake Herman

So we come home from a lovely day at the Brookings Summer Arts Festival. Windy, warm, just what we expect at Pioneer Park, and still loads fun—pix coming tomorrow!

But hang on to those art tents, Brookings—we're sending you a storm.

This thunder and lightning passed over Lake Herman just in time to produce a rainbow from the setting sun peeking under the cloud line in the northwest:



As a demonstration of how bad the typical cheap camcorder is, the microphone does not pick up the amazing, constant thunder around us. Fortunately, neither does my four-year-old, who is happily asleep, her cheek still adorned with the nice blue butterfly a girl at the arts festival painted on her cheek this noon.

The temp was in the 80s a couple hours ago when I got home from my bike ride. As the storm passed over, the temp dropped to 67. Right now at 21:21 CDT, it's 61°F on the west side of Lake Herman.

The storm here was relatively gentle: the rain was light, and the wind didn't blow hard enough to move our chairs around on the deck. But that lucky position of the storm line just off the horizon allowed the sun to break out and cast the churning clouds in that fearsome orange and crimson relief that says, "You are small."

Here's a video pan of the storm from WNW to NE over Lake Herman:



------------------------
Update 2010.07.12: See views of the same storm from Brookings-way from Tramplingrose.

Madison Pix: High Sun, High Water, High Corn

Bicycle, camera, no need to rush home... photos around town! (Click pix to embiggen!)

Looking west down Northwest First Street... in prairie towns, the sky is still the biggest thing around.

South on Highland Avenue, the water in Silver Creek is about two feet from the bottom of the bridge.

On the town side of the road, the ditch toward Gehl is full of water.

I take it all this rain has been good for corn... at least the corn on the high ground. This corn on the way to the state park looks like "knee high by the Fourth" won't be a problem. But like the water elsewhere, this corn is creeping into the ditch.

The Lake Herman spillway that sends water to Madison (and Lake Madison, and Lake Brant, and ultimately the Big Sioux River) is topped out.

Dick Simpson's dock isn't fit for sitting... unless you're wearing your swim trunks. His dock panels wait on shore for drier fishing weather.

GF&P is keeping its dock at the public boat ramp just barely above water. Last year around this time, nine or ten of those big concrete slabs forming the boat ramp lay above the water line. This year, only four slabs are dry. Another gauge: I went swimming yesterday in front of my place. The shore where I could just get my toes wet last June is now under two and a half feet of water.

We refer to the bump in the shore southeast of the boat ramp as "The Point" (akin to "The River," "The Hills," and "The Cities"). I think some maps call it "Stony Point." From the boatramp, one usually sees a long line of rip-rap stones where fishermen can sit in the shade. Those stones are all submerged.

The lake is also thickly green. The water was remarkably clear after our dry April. The May and June rains have brought in more field runoff, which I suspect means more nutrients from fetilizer and more food for algae. Those little green stringies really catch in a guy's whiskers....

GOP, Dems Convene, Name Candidates; KELO Talks About the Weather

Screen capture of KELOLand.com website, 2010.06.27 09:27 CDT, showing absence of political convention coverage. Click to enlarge; green dots mark weather stories.

If you get all of your news from television, you'd think nothing happens in South Dakota but wind and rain. I check the KELO website this morning and find that 15 of the front-page headlines deal with yesterday's stormy weather. Of 21 headlines, not one links to either the Republican or Democratic state conventions held this weekend.

KSFY doesn't offer much better. On their newly revamped site—more butch banner font, but content scattered, slow, and video-heavy—convention info is absent from the front page, and the Vote 2010 widget hasn't been updated since the primary. There might be something convention related on the Latest News widget, but at the moment, that block at the top of the KSFY site is empty.

The Republican convention in Huron saw three contested constitutional offices. The Democratic convention in Sioux Falls surprised some observers by recruiting candidates every statewide office below that embarrassing spot we left open on the U.S. Senate line. The Dems also had a battle for the PUC nomination, with Doyle Karpen edging out John Zaiko on a tight margin inflated by the weighted voting system (political conventions in South Dakota do not operate on the "one man, one vote" principle, per SDCL 12-5-18—you should see our vote-count spreadsheet!). The Republicans launched a sneaky tricks lawsuit campaign against the Democrats' lieutenant governor nominee, and the crafty Dems defused the ploy with a quick voter registration switch.

KDLT and KSFY repeated the AP story on the Arndt kerfuffle, and KELO ran some AP releases Friday, but none of the local TV stations did original reporting on the conventions.

Once again, if you want good political coverage, you have to hit the papers or hit the blogs. Kudos to Dakota War College for updates from the GOP convention floor in Huron. And hand me my own horn: I did what I could to blog and Twitter from the Dems convention in Sioux Falls. I'll admit, it's easier to cover a story when you're not an active participant—pretty tough to tweet when you're crafting an education plank, listening to testimony on charter schools, and checking spelling and grammar. But when the paid journalists won't haul their TV cameras across town to cover the story, well, we participants have to do what we can to keep the public informed.

------------------
Update 2010.06.29: Professional journalist Bob Mercer responds to our criticism, blames the political parties for the lack of media coverage, and says we have to talk nice to them (or at least not talk mean) if we want them to come next time.

Summer Storm in the City as I Wait to Drive Home

Want to experience separation from reality? Walk into Barnes and Noble as a thunderstorm approaches.

We've seen the storm coming for an hour. We've felt it coming all day. Weather like today's heat and humidity doesn't just hang; it hangs, then bangs.

I had hoped to go for a bike ride around Sioux Falls this evening. But when I stepped out of the Dem convention and found the solid grey wall of a thundercloud looming over Sioux Falls, I decided there were better places to be than the open road.

I ran a couple errands, hung a concert poster, got a cheap juice and jam and cheese, then stopped at the mall for a burger. Then I went back outside, to see what was coming.


Shoppers and clerks and mall security guys were stepping outside—sure, it fits: the security guys are paid to monitor threats, the storm's a threat, so sure, let 'em go outside to check the weather.

...is it gonna rain?...

...look at that one, little spin there...

...man, temperature dropped, like forty degrees...

Forty degrees is an exaggeration, but the churn of the clouds and the lightning isn't. it is noticeably cooler, and after a day of still, heavy air clinging to our clothes and hair and skin, this mild movement, the beginnings of mist, is a great relief.

When I was little, Mom said green clouds mean trouble. I looked west and north. The clouds were green.

The people around me—not shoppers, not consumers, not worker drones, but people again, made natural and primal in the face of a storm—have forgotten what brought them out to shop as nearly as I have forgotten the handshakes and nominations and debates about the need for verbs in sentences that brought me to the city. We wonder at the clouds, the wind, the swirling tiny fireflies of dust-mote droplets in the headlights. Only 6:30 p.m., and the street lights have snapped on. The storm is coming, and we are tiny before it, tiny as our cars and streets and the entire city, dwarfed by the towering, lumbering clouds.

I walk through that mist, cross lot and lanes to Barnes and Noble. There, too, on the north side of 41st Street, people stand outside, not completely afraid (or they wouldn't be here), but all with a palpable sense that they shouldn't stand and watch the coming storm for much longer. We can smell the lightning.

And then I walk inside, the double doors an airlock to altered space. Just four steps in, with a clear view out and first fresh whiffs of the tousle and damp we bring inside, the nice girl at the front table shows nothing but cheery determination to equip all mankind (or Sioux Falls-kind) with Nooks. The music plays on the speakers, a straggling clientele thinned by supper and storm buys fancy coffee. The books and sale placards remain orderly, the music hip and purchase-inducing. Nothing like the artificial world of commerce to make the real world disappear.

I sit to blog, and that outdoor anxiety disappears. Amidst all these books and commerce, there is no knowing of what is coming, only...

Crack! Crack! Boom!

...the sudden realization that it is here, a storm bigger than anything we do...

BOOM! Whoa!

...a crack of thunder over the pounding torrent sharp enough that people inside jump. Lights inside flicker, swift enough we aren't quite sure—did the power just blink? Is the storm that big? Power out at home, alone or with your family, is one thing. Power out in the city, in a store, surrounded by strangers... oh, the primal instincts of self-preservation that arise. I hear someone mention flashlights.

But the lights stay on. Behind me, three young people respond to the thunder as best humans can: with laughter. Around me are Star Wars Lego ships (my old X-Wing! oh, to be young and build it myself!), a Spanish Bingo set, and a girl in a black and white dress with a yellow flower in her hair.

I leave the coffee shop, head for the front of the store. People come in now less jaunty, drenched in summer clothes, now shivering in air-conditioning set for the hotter weather of an hour ago. I sit by the front window (lightning, thunder, wind, and I sit by five-foot sheets of glass—how does our species survive?) Trees and steel lamposts and the wide Wendy's sign alike shake. Sheets of rain—we can hardly see across the now great wet river of 41st Street.

...is it still raining? asks a man sitting with his back to the window, talking on his phone. A man at the door says this'll stop in 20 minutes. It's breaking up in the west, an old girlfriend's dad would always say in the midst of the most thunderous drenching. But yes, those little trees are shaking less. And how much more water can there be in one sky?

C-click, c-click, c-click, c-click... the girl in the black and white dress steps as softly as she can on tile in her summer shoes to the window to survey the storm. Her yellow flower, big as her face, is the brightest reflection in the window. Bright as the sunshine—yes, just that shade—that will break in twenty minutes and see us all home.

Lake Herman 60 Degrees, 70% Ice-Free

...and I go for a bike ride....

Whoo-hoo! Lake Herman is open... mostly! 60° Fahrenheit, big bright sun, and 20–30-mile-per-hour south wind have pounded the local ice cap apart (click pix to embiggen!):


The view from the porch: lake wide open toward the north! The white on the far shore is the ice heaved up by the wind onto the rocks.

Looking east toward the state park, we see some ice still hung up along our shore in "Cottonwood Cove."
South side of the lake still socked in. Tomorrow's seventies and more south wind ought to fix that.

Of course, what's a beautiful day like today without a bike ride! I stopped by Lake Herman Auto, where my neighbor Dan Uthe has had a 2008 Smart fortwo on display this month. dan didn't pay me to stop by to do an ad; I just wanted to compare the Smart to my favored mode of transportation:

The Smart is a little longer than my Burley, although if I were riding in long-wheelbase mode, it would be close. It cost me $900 to get my Burley six summers ago; Dan's asking $13,998 for the Smart. On dollars per inch, I think I got the better deal.

But if my bike had a car rack, I'd have bungeed that Smart to the back of my bike and brought it home.

March 1, Sunshine... What's that Sound?

And now for the Madville Times weather report:



Meteorologists call March 1 the first day of spring. How about you?

Brass Monkey Alert: -33°F at Lake Herman

I look out my window at Lake Herman, South Dakota, this morning. I'm greeted by a gorgeous clear sky... and my thermometer:
Well, at least I have an excuse to use the Chiller font.

I heard a guy on the Weather Channel Wednesday griping about the old snap in Atlanta. He said it's especially hard on people who have to work outside. Predicted Atlanta high: mid-20s... above zero.

p.s.: Madison Central schools are closed today, as are a whole bunch of other South Dakota institutions of learning. Anyone care to guess how many of our high school kids will manage to get their cars started to drive to Sioux Falls today?

Blizzard Boosts Nanny State

Mr. Epp raises an issue that our conservative friends haven't touched yet. He notes that Pierre's five-alarm response to our Christmas snowstorm was nanny-statism par excellence.

Fellow members of Gov. Rounds own party–the Republican Party–often complain about all the restrictions and safety consciousness that the Nanny Staters place or wish to place on the rest of us right thinking citizens.

Here, Gov. Rounds took away every citizens’ right to go out in to the teeth of a blizzard, get stuck, and freeze to death like people did in Nebraska and other states where far wiser governors allowed their Interstates to be open before and during the recent blizzard. Nanny Stater Mike had no one die on his watch in South Dakota because he wouldn’t let them go out and exercise their right to be stupid [Todd Epp, "Dang That Nanny Stater Gov. Rounds! He Saved Lives in the Blizzard!" Middle Border Sun via KELO, 2009.12.27].

As the storm hardly raged over Lake Herman, I had to wonder how Republicans remained so unperturbed at what felt like an over-reaction. Closing the Interstates for three days? Some friends made a trip to Brookings during the closure and found old Highway 77 up to Medary packed with motorists. Close the safest roads in the state, drive folks to the skinny backroads—not the best outcome.

Dad and I have cleared the driveway and shoveled some walks in town. Sure, it snowed a lot, but it didn't strike us as "historic" snowfall. We've moved more snow than this. We've driven to town through bigger drifts.

Travel restrictions are about as Stalinist a government restriction as you get, yet I haven't heard one conservative protest. Fascinating.

I've heard an interesting conspiracy theory: Maybe the extended Interstate closing was really a calculated budget move: work to keep the Interstate open over Christmas day, and we'd have to pay triple overtime. Why not just tell everyone to stay home?

I'll admit, if that was the real thinking behind closing the Interstates, it wasn't a bad idea. And if the Governor had just made that case—"Come on, folks: the state's short on cash, it's Christmas, businesses aren't going to be open anyway... just stay home and save money"—a lot of folks might have bought that line.

Instead, the Governor went for full-tilt fear-mongering (how many live press-conferences do we need about the weather?). Sound that alarm too often, and folks stop listening.

Last week's blizzard was half snow, half hype. At the very least, Republicans need to get honest about their views on government protecting us from our own bad decisions.

Warning to Friends at DSU East Hall: Look Up!

...and other notes from a quiet winter day...

You write your final final exam at DSU, you step out into a glorious, non-life-threatening December day... or so you think (cue Jaws theme)...



Meanwhile, several blocks away, the folks at West Center Baptist might want to check what they're paying the kid shoveling their sidewalk (click pic to enlarge):


I tried that trick on my dad when I was little. I thought my argument that shoveling just half the sidewalk would bring people closer together was a brilliant riff on the Christmas theme. My dad was not impressed.

Evidently the city has called in help to hand out snow removal tickets:

The Tea City Police Mustang—doh! Charger!—made a trip to Madison, complete with NASCAR-approved cow catcher on the front. Say, wouldn't that trooper car look even more super with a little Knight Rider-style light on the hood for cop flashers?

So Cold My Banana Is Hot

...as are DVD deals...

How cold is it?

Yesterday I started the Jeep (wruh... wruh... wruh... wruh... prum-biddi-pum-pum-pum!). As I sat in the subzero driver's seat, letting the Jeep run to warm up, I pulled out a banana for lunch.

Look closely at the top of the banana. It was steaming.

Of course, it's never too cold for a deal on DVDs:
The parking lot in front of Mr. Movies was filled at noon. When I drove by at ten 'til, folks were lined up outside in front of the Going out of Business sign, waiting to get into Mr. Movies' liquidation sale. Brad Wede had advertised the sale as starting noon, but he appears to have had the decency to open the doors early so folks wouldn't get hypothermia in their quest for cheap disks.

The cold does make news travel more slowly: Elisa Sand alerts me that she has updated her MDL story on the store closing to give Dan Roemen some cover. The story now says that Dan Roemen, owner of Sunshine grocery and the Mr. Movies building, offered the business the opportunity to renew its lease for five years, but Mr. Movies "chose not to make that commitment."

43 Degrees, NW Wind at 14, More Rain Coming... Let's Golf!

"I don't think the heavy stuff will come down for a while..." (Carl Spackler, advising the Bishop. Caddyshack, 1980)

Hey, South Dakotans! Take a look out your window. Want to go for a walk?

Neither do I. It's rainy, cool, windy... worse than a good snowstorm! At least snow I can shovel for money and lob at Jon Hunter for fun.

But 107 golfers and a few hundred dedicated moms, dads, coaches, and friends are going for a walk in this weather right now, for the second day in a row. Day 2 of the Boys' State A golf championship is kicking off just a mile north of my house on the shores of Lake Herman. They may actually be thankful for the rain: it may have finally washed away the stink of stagnant algae that filled the creek that splits the Madison Country Club in half.

There may be some sports fans who think the golfers are just the skinny kids who aren't tough enough for football. If that thinking is out there, I would suggest going out to the Madison Country Club to watch these golfers brave the elements for state tournament glory. Oh yeah, those football boys go play their championship inside, don't they? And these golfers don't have the adrenaline of semi-organized violence to distract them from the cold, just intense concentration and long walks with heavy bags.

Swing hard, fellas. And readers, check out SDPB's coverage and photostream from the shores of Lake Herman!

SDPB updates on its Facebook page: 10 a.m. shotgun start on Lake Herman, 41°F, NW wind 20 mph. (For my Canadian readers, that's 5°C, 32 kph... 12:30 p.m. in Newfoundland.)

Lake Herman Weather Update: Constant Thunder, Sprinkles, But No Hard Storm

Nasty thunderstorms moving one county south of us...



...and just as I get done shooting this video from the front porch, the clouds start breaking up in the west. Go figure!