Hans' Thoughts: Never Strikes Twice

If you don’t like the weather in Iowa, just wait a minute.

This cliché has been applied to many locales (such as Paris), but it is especially true when the Midwest is being assaulted by a line of thunderstorms. Frequent travelers have come to dread hearing the phrase, “thunderstorms in Chicago.” A few bolts of lightning and O’ Hare is shut down for hours, delaying flights across the country. These rolling storms move quickly, turning a blue summer day into a hurricane and then clearing again before the gameday pancakes are cool.

We have had a weird Spring and Summer this year. The Spring was unusually wet and cold, adding an annoying month onto Winter. Our lawns and herb gardens relished the drenching rains, but farmers couldn’t get into their fields to plant: too muddy to plow the soil and too cold for the corn to sprout. Then Summer came, the weather warmed dramatically, and fields got planted. Our cold, wet May gave way to an unprecedented heat wave. With heat indices regularly above 100, working all day in the garden became impossible and the weeds slowly consumed our crop. But hot, humid weather is ideal for the corn’s maturation and the fields quickly made up for their slow start. It is often said that on warm, still July nights you can actually hear the corn growing; it’s an odd squeaking, rustling sound. Crop forecasts became insanely optimistic, predicting a record corn yield. All we needed was a continuation of the “timely rains.”

Then, a strange thing happened: it stopped raining.

In Eastern Iowa, around Iowa City, the rain just kept missing us. It would go to the north or the south. Epic lines of thunderstorms rolling across the prairie would suddenly break into pieces and dissipate right over our heads. Weird. It just wouldn’t rain. Western Iowa, being drenched by record flooding along the Missouri River, breathed a collective sigh of relief. But the tomato plants stopped bearing fruit after a single crop. Lawns grew more slowly, and then turned brown. And the corn yields fell.

On Saturday, we were all hoping for a bit more rain; we just wanted it to start after the Hawkeyes were done with their season opener. That’s what we call a “timely rain”. But less than hour before kickoff, the heavens opened and soaked the field, the stands, the players, and the fans. The game went ahead as scheduled, the doppler images promising clearing skies by halftime. Conditions improved but the in-stadium souvenir stands sold out of dry shirts.

Suddenly, in the middle of the third quarter, a random stroke of lightning erupted a few miles to the west of stadium. The game officials, following the NCAA lightning safety manual (http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_pls/Sports_Medicine_Handbook_lightning.pdf) to the letter, declared a 30 minute hiatus of the game. The Doppler image was impressive: a “pop-up” thunderstorm of legendary proportions had suddenly appeared from nowhere. We knew it was about to rain and rain hard. For nearly an hour the pent-up frustrations of a summer drought were unleashed onto Kinnick Stadium. It was raining so hard it was literally painful. All but a few hundred loyal die-hards headed for the exit. At the time of the suspension, Iowa was leading 34-0 over a FCS school, Tennessee Tech. When a game is interrupted by weather, school officials have four options:

1) Postpone the game and resume play at a mutually arranged later date

2) Consider it a “no contest” and enter it in the books as never happened

3) Count it as a forfeiture by the home team

4) Stop play and count the game as complete with the current score

In most cases, option #1 is not desirable; scheduling another game is just too messy. I am sure that the folks in South Bend would prefer to choose option 2 for their game against South Florida, but that didn’t make any sense for Iowa. I’m not sure when option #3 would ever occur. I had assumed, due the lopsided score and relative non-importance of the game, the officials would favor option #4. This was in fact the decision in Ann Arbor, where the game between Michigan and Western Michigan was called due to lightning with Michigan ahead.

Despite the torrent, the parties involved “wanted to get the game in” and waited 90 minutes for the storm to pass. The players emerged onto the field to play before a nearly empty stadium. The remaining time passed quickly and Tennessee Tech managed to score a touchdown for their efforts.

Weather played havoc with other games across the region that day. Michigan- Western Michigan was called early due to weather, as I mentioned. South Florida was leading Notre Dame at halftime, when the stadium was evacuated due to lightning. Play resumed 2.5 hours later, but was stopped again. The Domers had narrowed the gap in the score; cancelling was not an option. Play resumed and the game finally, mercifully ended at 8:00 pm local time after starting around 2. Poolers following the Marshall – West Virginia game (the last opportunity to knock Gran off her week 1 win) had endure another similar lengthy delay.