John Hart Asher is the host of the PBS show Central Texas Gardener. So it’s on brand that he was gardening in his East Austin backyard when the big storm came in on Wednesday.
“If the rain's coming, I try to work my plants in,� said Asher, who ended up getting much more than rain.
“I looked over my shoulder and I noticed this massive blue, dark blue shelf [of clouds],� he said.
He spotted a smaller nearby cloud rotating near the storm system, then, he said, “everything just dropped out.�
After running inside the house, he watched dangerous winds, rain and hail take visibility outside “to zero.�
“It sounded like a freight train,� Asher said. “I grew up in Mississippi. I’m used to tornadoes my whole life, and this is the first time here in Austin where I told [my wife] Bonnie and the kids to go take shelter.�
They were right to do it. In under an hour, severe winds damaged thousands of homes, floods swept cars off the street, and downed trees left over 180,000 people without power. The raging water from the flash floods also left at least one person dead.
But, at that exact same time, the skies were blue south of the Colorado River. You might not have even known bad weather was happening at all if you were there.
That’s because the storm was something called a “microburst.�
“It was one storm,� Bob Fogarty, meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said. “If you looked at the radar, at that time, there was a single storm."
Fogarty said that’s different from the storm lines or storm fronts we typically see in Central Texas.
“There was nothing north of it, there was nothing south of it,� he said.
Like those larger systems a microburst storm is cooked up by extreme air temperature differences and clashing wind currents, but it stands alone.
Viewed from a distance it can sometimes look almost like a mushroom cloud, with a massive storm head (likely the “shelf� Asher said he saw) suddenly dumping cold air and precipitation from its center back to ground as it moves over the land.
“When they hit the ground, they spread out and they can be very destructive,� Fogarty said.
What happened in Austin is called a “long track microburst,� because it covered more ground and lasted longer than
The storm traveled Northwest to Southeast. Staying mostly north of the river, it pummeled a swath of town about 10 miles long and up to 2.5 miles wide with heavy rain, hail and winds that were as strong as a Category 1 hurricane or an EF0 tornado.
“They estimated the maximum winds at 85 miles an hour based on the damage that they saw,� Fogarty said.
Those winds wreaked havoc on the trees in Asher’s neighborhood. The “pocket prairies� of native plants and grasses he was planting when the storm came in were flattened.
But, he said, he lucked out. His home got through undamaged and his yard should recover.
“This will all pop back up,� he said, pointing to his backyard. “It looks a little rough right now, but it'll pop back.�
