I learned a new word this week. Derecho is a Spanish word that translates roughly to, "#@&%$*@!"
According to NOAA, that's the kind of weather event that wiped out an astonishing chunk of real estate in Southern Missouri and knocked down 50 or so acres of my timber. Actually, if you look closely at Lesterville on the photo that I swiped from the NOAA web page, you'll see that it was a microburst spawned by the derecho.
I'll take their word for it. All I can say is that I've made 47 laps around the sun and rode out a tornado in a trailer house, but I've never seen anything like what this storm did.
Here's a video clip of a derecho that was caught on film in Oklahoma a few years back. Sorry but Youtube won't let me embed this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyvTuWAexMU