Worst weather you remember

Moin everyone

With a new climate extrem record being set every other year and media calling every drought, storm or frost "once in a century" I'd like to ask especially the older forum users the following:

What's the worst weather you can remember. Be it bone chilling frost, water up to the brim of your roof or a heat wave that ignited your garden shed.

I'd really like to hear a few "war stories" from back in the days and if you personally think it has gotten worse over the years.

For myself, I actually can't remember the region I live in being as dry as it is now. Back in my youth it was mostly wetlands, mud so deep it ate more than one pair of boots. Nowadays the ground is cracked and there is a fire at least once per year. Ponds dried up and even with the ground water being so high, grass is mostly brown instead of the lush green I remember from my youth.

 

The worst I remember is about 1963-ish and it snowed on a Boxing Day. We built a snowman (or should that be snowperson ?)
It was still there at Easter time ... I don't know when Easter was that year, it may have been early but it was still a long time after Boxing Day.

My dad was in University in the 1930s studdying geology. Their lecturer told them he'd once been to Greenland and stood on a glacier, and after a few years he went there again, but the glacier had retreated a long way back ... That was in the 1930s.

 

Three times, in my lifetime, stick in my mind.
1963, big freeze, there was another one, but shorter 1987.

Summer 1976 and the heat.

The so called hurricane of October 1987.

It's strange looking back, because it's just occurred to me I've not come up with anything memorable in the last 20years or so.

Just remembered the flooding in 2000 I think it was.

 

Winter of 1962–63 in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia.

I can remember this too, apparently when I was out playing in the snow I came in crying to my Mum complaining that my hands had ' gone rusty' as despite wearing mittens my hands had turned bright red!!

 

1976 British Isles heat wave - Wikipedia

Never ,ever forget this!! Working in a Hairdressing salon with 2 banks of hair dryers blowing out more hot air....it was a furnace !!

 

To be honest I actually remember that really started in 1975,the summer that year was warm, and the drought was not a couple of months as it might seem, the under ground aquifers died out, and that doesn't happen over a short period of time.
As I remember, it finished abruptly with lots of heavy rain in September, but the actual start was a bit more blurred.

 

I also remember that 1976 summer.
My mother had a friend living on a hill farm near our village and had her water from a well (It's still the same in those hill properties, they are not connected to the mains even today)
Anyway the well on this farm had run dry so my mother's farmer friend used to come to our house twice a day with a tractor pulling a trailer full of milk churns.
We'd fill the churns with water and she'd take them back for the cows who had to drink so many gallons every day.
That went on for several weeks, and the reservoir up in the mountains had almost run dry.

 

Before my time, but apparently 1947 was another humdinger of a winter that just went on and on.

 

In the UK I remember 1962/63 Winter as it was my last year of School and had to walk to school in knee-high snow.

In August 1963 I moved to Alabama US and it was 100F and I thought I would die!

I have lived through many tornados in Alabama, frightening things. The worst was in April 1974 when an F5 struck Huntsville where we lived and 16 died. This is where T'other Half worked at Parkway City Mall which was totally destroyed and had to be levelled. Luckily it happened in the early morning hours.

 

My mother used to say about that too ... her and my dad had got married and went to London by train on their honeymoon, but the tracks were blocked with snow so they came home.
They never got their honeymoon, not even a 'second' one (which would actually have been their first anyway )

 

The reason that stands out in my mind is because my parents also got married that year and they had the wedding photos taken in mid April with snow piled all around.

In January 1987 we had a two day blizzard that cut off a lot of the villages around here. Drifts were so deep that you could just about see the tops of the road signs in places.
I remember helicopters dropping off supplies in some cut off places that were running out.
I also remember walking 3 miles to work and 3 miles back each day in it for over a week. The temperatures were well below zero for some time.

 

At 14 at the time I don't remember 1963 being all that bad, staying as I did on the south coast of Fife.
I do remember a spell in the late 80s when we had about 10 days of hard freezing fog. I had a single-skin soft-top car and every time I went over a bump the accumulated ice on the inside of the roof came down like a blizzard. And you couldn't put the heater on or it rained!