The shade of a tree or building can reduce the temperature by eight degrees. I posted a column years ago from the Ellwood City Area Historical Society Newsletter. These folks devoted an issue of the newsletter to the first covered bridge that connected Ellwood City, PA with Hazel Dell, a smaller village on the north side of town.  The length of the bridge was 165 feet with a width of twelve feet eight inches.  The width was determined to accommodate the size of buggies and wagons. These covered bridges were constructed to provide shelter for travelers during inclement weather.  Also in the newsletter was the use of the spring house that preserved milk and meat from spoiling during the warm summer months in addition to supplying fresh spring water. Now that Christobol is downgraded and moving to the western Great Lakes, another system created consequences for us. In 2001, Tropical Storm Allison weakened to a depression and stalled over eastern Texas.  On June 8, the remnants of the storm drifted south, re-forming over the northwestern Gulf of Mexico.  The system lingered, spun and reorganized as a tropical cyclone before moving inland over Louisiana on the 11th. That morning, the winds increased to 45 m.p.h., as the center moved across southeastern Louisiana and southeastern Mississippi.  On June 14 it became a sub-tropical depression and tracked east-northeast, stalling over eastern North Carolina. For three days it wandered around the mid-Atlantic coast, merged with a cold front and dissipated in Nova Scotia on the 19th.  Allison was a tremendous rain machine dumping 36.99 inches on Houston and more than 20 inches in Baton Rouge.  It caused $5 billion damage and 41 deaths and became the costliest and deadliest U.S. tropical storm on record.