that nobody on watch that evening recognized it for what it was. I see lines of wicked-looking thunderstorms quite often on our local radar.
The word "derecho" was apparently new to our newspaper people . . . Oddly enough, they had used it a couple of days earlier . . but then were corrected because the derecho blows for hundreds of miles, not just across a county. Maybe the weather gods were saying, "You wanna know what a derecho is? Check this out!"