Hurricane-force winds hit Phoenix

his news is a couple days old, but on Thursday night we had a doozie of a storm roll through.

With persistent lightning flashes like a flickering strobe light, the heart of the severe thunderstorm hit around 11:30pm.

As the wind picked up and roared down our street, Kaye and I saw what we'd only before seen in TV coverage of hurricanes.

Until the street lights went out, and then our electricity followed.

Then all we could see was intermittently illuminated by the lightning. Some of the flashes of light were an eerie bluish-green. We assume those must've been explosions from transformers on power poles.

Luckily nothing blew over in our yard (or onto our house). Our neighbors weren't so lucky. Right next door they lost half a tree in their front yard. And a few houses down the street, an entire tree toppled on to the roof of an empty house for sale (a silver lining of the sluggish housing market).

A block away, at Altadena Park, they lost four massive trees, entirely uprooted.

And a few blocks from that, along a major thoroughfare that we take nearly every day, a string of maybe ten power poles all blew down into the four-lane roadway.

They said the gusts reached 100mph (which would qualify as a category 2 hurricane). Kaye said she can't remember a worse storm growing up here. I've certainly never been in any storm more violent than that.

And, of course, Ori slept through it all.

Here are some images...

And a couple video clips...