We talk of it raining cats and dogs, and every now and then someone comes long with a story of a shower of herrings or sardines caught up in a whirlwind and deposited on a startled population. That fairly staid publication Scientific American presents an issue devoted entirely to weather - what we can and cannot do about it, and, dammit isn't there a huge heading "It's Raining EELS". And many stories of like occurrences. We'll work backwards from the more recent, for you might not give serious credit to something dated 1780. Anyway, the latest is July 9th, 1995, with the heading "No safety anywhere". It tells us that lightning from a storm in Bristol, Florida, struck a tree, sending a power surge through the water in a nearby septic tank. The exploding water catapulted a 69-year-old man sitting on his toilet into the air. A hospital treated and released the man, who suffered only elevated blood pressure and tingling in his lower extremities. "More Ways To Pluck A Bird Than One" is dated June 8th, 1958, and tells how a tornado tore off the feathers of a chick in Flint, Michigan, and the local paper showed a photo of it pecking around a truck that has been twisted by the same tornado "like a steel pretzel". The National Severe Storms Forecast Centre remarks on the story: "While it is not our mission . . . to record tornados which deplumed fowls, enough events of this phenomenon have been documented over the past 140 years to warrant its acceptance".
But to the shower of eels? It happened in 1892. An enormous number of eels fell during a rainstorm in Coalburg, Alabama. Farmers quickly drove into town with carts and took the eels away to use as fertilisers for their fields. "The eel deluge", says the article, "may have resulted from a waterspout lifting and jettisoning the fishes." Odd use of very good eating was it not? A friend in Paris used to plead with his Irish colleagues not to bring smoked salmon as a present, but smoked eel. Much superior, he always maintained. In March 1876, the magazine reports that many witnesses in Bath County in north-east Kentucky observed "flakes of meat" drifting down from a clear sky. One investigator declared that the flakes tasted like mutton or venison. The cause? Lightning may have struck a flock of birds and roasted them. And lightning in the Wasatch National Forest in Utah apparently killed by a single stroke, more than 500 sheep (1918). No mention of pennies from Heaven anywhere, but such oddities as snowflakes in Montana "measuring as much as 15 by 8 inches." And we complain about our weather!