When facing monsters like Katrina, Ivan, Frederick, Camille, and even Opal with the devastation she wrought inland, it is easy to pass over the “weak” brothers and sisters who come calling.
A perfect example is what the newspaper out of Mobile, Alabama (the “Mobile Register”) dubbed “Serene Arlene”. This was a tropical storm that looked like a hurricane on a half-shell. There was no westward formation at all, the eye was all but non existent; yet she was determined to pay a visit to the battered Gulf Coast.
This first named storm of the 2005 Atlantic Season dropped a scant 6 inches of rain. As she rolled in, there was a reported gust of 60 miles per hour.
Arlene brought showers and not much else. Her winds were light, and the surge was weak. Even after her waters flooded the lobby of the condominium tower called Edgewater West, she was still a weak storm. Never mind the thousands of dollars in damage done to the pool from the constant push of sand. Never mind the cars shoved over a sand covered west beach road that more resembled snow drifts than sand dunes. She was not big.
It has to be a big storm. Only then do we all pay attention to the system and the effects.
Thomas Summerlin never had that luxury. Struck dead from what most of us would call a thundershower, he died instantly from a bolt of lightning. His stepson, Noah Butler, almost made it to South Baldwin Hospital where he was pronounced dead. 
It was just a thunder shower. That shower left a woman widowed and her other children wondering “why”?
This weather that we all love so much, these storms that excite us; they are killers. Even, if not especially, the ones that pass under our radar. Think on this, every time we hear thunder, and every time we feel rain, we can be at grave risk. Even the most innocuous shower holds lethal results for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Of course, that will not stop me from chasing my storms, which will not stop the thrill in my heart when I see a super-cell system forming up. It will make me think, it will make me reflect. As much as I love strong systems, sometimes the weakest of them all make all the difference in our own worlds.