Freaks of the Storm

In the course of his numerous talks and presentations to college and grade school students, civic clubs, and nursing homes, climatologist Randy Cerveny found that people of all ages are fascinated by the “unusual” — and he seized on that fascination to tell them about strange weather. Now, in his first book, the rest of us can learn of real, documented stories such as these: Odd occurrences of chickens losing all their feathers during tornadoes (so-called “chicken plucking”); Strange stories of finding lightning victims who have been completely stripped of all of their clothes (through a process known as “the vapor effect”); Weird stories of how past powerful hailstorms have both led to the ending of one war — and the complete prevention of another; Bizarre uses of weather — such as the strange contraption called a “windwagon” that literally “sailed” nearly 500 miles from Kansas to Colorado; Each chapter in Freaks of the Storm encompasses the oddities of a specific type of weather, such as tornadoes, hurricanes, lightning, and hail. The author also divides specific conditions into a set of categories associated with the overall phenomena.