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Comment by rblatz | Hacker News Reader

I went through one of these in Ohio in the early 2000s. It was intense, there were huge dense clouds of cicadas flying around. It was extremely loud, and my windshield was a complete mess.

It really did feel like a biblical plague of locusts.

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I was just a kid just outside of the DC metro area in the country. I remember my dad and I had to stop the car on the side of the highway because the air was so dense with cicadas and the wipers weren't up to the task.

The noise when getting out and standing in that cloud was difficult to describe. It was so loud, all blended together and harmonized into this weird tone that you felt almost like a colored liquid. Completely surreal.

One of my favorite memories with my dad, looking back.

The massive DC/MD/VA ones are the 17 year Brood X and came out in 2021.

I was in DC in 2004 and it was incredible. The sidewalks were like a crunchy carpet. At times they drowned out rush hour traffic.

I remember the telephone poles being covered and the crunching sound while driving slowly on a residential street.

The 2004 brood was far more memorable than the 2021 brood. 2004 was like you said. In 2021 there was only one place in my neighborhood where that level of noise happened.

While I don't know that I've ever experienced a double brood, I've experienced plenty of cicada hatches in my life and this is probably the best way to describe the auditory experience that I've seen! I never know how to describe it to people who haven't been in it but that's a great way. It feels like you're almost swimming in the sound it's so intense. I once was driving along a highway during a brood and thought something was wrong with my car because of this awful sound that had just started, stopped at a rest stop, and was instantly immersed in cicada sound. It was wild!

I was in Nashville for the last Brood XIX emergence (2011)-- where they actually emerge is pretty patchy, but they were pretty dense around my office building, to the point where you couldn't walk down the sidewalk without stepping on cicadas or cicada shells with almost every step. Went to an area renaissance fair that same month, and they were just about deafening in the forest around the site (thankfully weren't swarming too badly where people were, at least).

I'm not looking forward to this May. Not sure what to expect at home this time around (still in Nashville, but a different part of town)-- hopefully they're not too bad, but I suspect my noise-cancelling headphones will be getting a workout while they're out.

Was there a clean-up effort afterwards around town?

At least snow melts and evaporates, but dead bugs all over the streets?

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