Freak of Nature

In the last month at Whoop Whoop, there has been a fair amount of meterological happenings.

One day as we were chewing our undigestable free lunch from the hospital cafeteria, we heard the sound of banging on the roof. The banging turned into pounding and the sky turned a dark grey before we suddenly saw a storm of hail come raining down past the window.

Small at first... gathering in momentum, frequency and size. There was no time to react, no time to move our cars. All we could do was watch. And watch we did. For 30 minutes the hail pounded out of the sky and savaged the ground. Man made and natural were destroyed alike, the hail showing no discrimination between tress and cars.

Once the storm cleared we ventured outside, the ground full of golf ball sized ice covering the ground like a layer of popcorn. We walked to our cars to see the roof of every single car in town puckered like the dimples on a golf ball. No car was spared unless it was garaged. No window facing south was left intact.

The next day the government declared it a natural disaster zone.

However yesterday the sky turned an ominous dark shade and those clouds began to reform for round two. I dashed to the shopping centre for refuge and watched as the rain and hail returned to town, beating down against the city in fury and mocking its inhabitants.

Apparently the storm produced a freak tornado that lashed a nearby village with winds up to 150kmph. Vortices of destruction and chaos.

It's humbling that even in the 21st century we can land people on the moon, communicate in real time with people in other countries, yet are subject to the forces of nature. We are still human and frail and at the mercy of forces greater than ourselves.

Forces that seem to be writhing in pain like a woman in labour.