If it is pouring with rain outside and you happen to be speaking to a native English speaker, they may say something to you like, “Look! It’s raining cats and dogs!” It’s a very popular idiom. Of course, it does not mean that cats and dogs are falling from the clouds. It’s a way of expressing the fact that it’s raining very hard. Cats and dogs do not fall from the sky. But fish do.

On Saturday 24 August 1918, it was pouring with rain and thundering over a city called Sunderland on the north east coast of England. The storm lasted for only about ten minutes. People were amazed to see that it was not just rainwater pouring from the skies. There were fish pouring down, too!  People gathered around to find out what was happening. They could not believe their own eyes. There were thousands of fish – which were later identified as being sand eels – lying on the ground in puddles of water. They were about seven centimetres long, all were frozen solid, and they were dead.

Even though they are called sand eels, they are actually fish that happen to look like eels. They swim together in large shoals, often in shallow and sandy water, and can be found in large numbers in the North Sea, which stretches out to the east of Sunderland. How was it possible for these sand eels to fall from the sky and land on Sunderland?

Scientists believed the heavy thunderstorm that afternoon may have caused a waterspout. Waterspouts can be formed when strong winds swirl over shallow water. They are so powerful, anything less than one metre in length can be sucked into them and forced into the clouds. The clouds carry whatever has been sucked into them for long distances – sometimes over 150 kilometres. It’s very cold up there and everything soon freezes solid.

For hundreds of years there have been reports of small animals being sucked into the sky through waterspouts:

• 2009    Dead tadpoles rained down on the city of Nanao in Japan.
• 2012    50 kilos of prawns fell from the sky over Sri Lanka.
• 2017    Fish fell on the coastal city of Tampico in Mexico.

It must be a very strange experience to see fish raining down on you. It would probably hurt if one fell on your head! With climate change and constant reports of typhoons and hurricanes, will the time ever come when it may actually begin to rain cats and dogs?

Question:

Fish fall from the sky during rainstorms in eastern Texas

VOCABULARY