Arizona is just determined to make headlines. And for the first time in a while, it has nothing to do with our political climate.
Although it does have something to do with the weird shift in climate in such a way that makes one think Mother Nature is taking her cues from classic Hollywood films.
A delayed summer heat that has lingered past its welcome in the Southwest finally cooled off Tuesday only to deliver four reported tornadoes in the northern half of our state and hail that got up to about 2 inches in diameter.
That’s right, Arizona. We’re not in Kansas anymore.
Arizonans all over woke up to a displaced state, but for those in the Phoenix metro areas, the storm uprooted trees, dislocated and threw branches across the streets, flooded and closed freeways, tore down power lines and even destroyed 20 percent of the inventory at St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix, according to an Arizona Republic report.
For those who had power, or a television that wasn’t destroyed by a branch through their living room window, nothing beat watching the seemingly endless coverage on local news channels.
Channel 3’s Mike Watkiss took the cake, hilariously freaking out while doing some storm chasing, sans umbrella. In all the chaos, he compared hail to bullets, told us how painful it was to be outside, and kicked a puddle of rain at his camera man.
Ah, Phoenix.
Another highlight of the storm was the lightning Tuesday night, accenting the clouds like Zeus when he crashes Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony” in Fantasia.
Unfortunately, when 70 mph winds and sheets of rain that would have given Forrest Gump’s rain log a run for its money, it left behind a drowned Tempe campus and almost uncrossable walkways.
Of course, we can’t really ignore the social irony of the storm — sometimes in good literature, the setting of a scene tends to reflect the inner state of a character. Perhaps such is the case with Arizona, which can’t seem to make up its mind about which extreme it wants to flaunt about in today’s national news.
We need a break, and we got one. Now, if the sun would just dry up these infinite puddles that make flip flops on campus impossible to walk in, we’ll return to weather being small talk, like it is everywhere else. And we’ll keep the mass amounts of desert water the way they should be — man-made. (If nothing else, it helped give Tempe a head start on the filling of Town Lake, which is supposed to start Friday).
So chlorinate those backyard pools and cue the sprinklers, watch the video of Mike Watkiss tell you how it is, and bring us back to the real news — like those midterm elections and getting people to the polls next month.
