No, it's not Mordor or the end of the world...

[alfreda89]

But it was one freaky, scary storm that swept swiftly into Helsinki, Finland on Sunday night. This reminds me of being on the playground back in early elementary school, and suddenly the teachers were in a panic and herding us all into line to go back into our old, multistory brick school building. I glanced west, and to the west the sky was BLACK. In the Midwest, this is not good -- it means tornadoes. The mother of all storms seemed to be descending.

Back then, they lined you up three or four deep against lockers, in a row, your arms and head on the shoulders of the kid in front of you. We stood that way for over an hour -- it felt like an entire day. Eventually, they let us go back to class. Turned out that fields to the west had been plowed that morning, and a strong wind had picked up fresh black soil and spun it into the air. But I've seen a real storm happen like this, and move almost as fast as this Helsinki storm (in Ohio, that storm was -- strong enough to pick up my small station wagon on one side and repeatedly drop it. I was inside the car, so it's a strong memory.)

I can't believe the people who were NOT moving out of the way of this incoming storm. The time elapse is 1:54!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_doIsFnqeg&feature=player_embedded

Comments

[incandragon.livejournal.com]

Amazing!

[morfin.livejournal.com]

wow. Makes one wonder if Tolkien ever saw something like that but I suspect his real inspiration for the dark cloud out of Mordor was the soot clouds of Birmhingham spoiling his childhood home.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Or something from his years fighting in WWI -- the smoke on battlefields can obscure everything, and the heavy cannon used by the Germans -- could it have really raised the smoke wall, like during the Civil War?