Storm pics

These are pics up the street from my house. Unfortunately (or rather fortunately) we didn't get pics of the downed meter and power lines at my house before they fixed it so I can't show my personal damage such as it was. The house on the left belongs to a friend of my grandmother's. She had a huge limb fall and puncture the roof. You can see the blue tarp covering the hole. On the right is the trailer that had the big cedar tree in the yard that snapped. Part of it is in the road still. It fell away from the trailer or it would have flattened that end. I still have part of their trailer skirting in my yard.





These are the two houses that I think sustained the most damage. These are all in close proximity to my house. Scary. It looks like someone just stomped her porch flat. The white house that had the porch flattened is just up the street from my place and the other is across the railroad tracks. The bottom one by far the worst. She had a GIANT tree fall over on her house and had major damage.



This is our poor little community gazebo-thing. It is no more. There used to be a bulletin board between those posts where people could post local events.





Another close call. That would have been devastating if that had fallen just a few feet the other direction.



Fortunately, there aren't any houses near this one.



These pieces of metal USED to be a shed that housed a man's riding lawnmower. His shed blew into a dozen pieces all over town but his lawnmower was still standing.



Patched shingles, hanging light fixtures...



Fortunately, no one was living in this trailer and hadn't been for some time.

All in all, everyone is pretty lucky. There were other trees down (including next door to my house) but nearly all of them missed the houses with a couple of exceptions. It could have been far worse than it was so we all feel pretty lucky (at least the ones that sustained light damage). My parents lost several huge trees in their back yard and it blew up some shingles but no real damage to their house. The right side of my car (the side that was against the wind) looked like someone had shot it with a grass and mud bazooka. It was gross. Seeing everything that went on around town tho, I guess I'm lucky it didn't blow my car cover (one of those aluminum ones that you just park under) away.

Live wires, downed trees, smashed sheds, OH MY!

I have been told we had a tornado last night. Jake and I were playing WoW, minding our own business questing when some alliance jerkwad comes over and kills us for sport (/begin mini-rant - WHY do the lvl 70's come kill me when I'm not worth honor points? I'm only lvl freakin 43 right now for heaven's sake. Why don't you go pester someone who can do some damage to your twinked out ass. Coward. /end rant) and bitching about it when the rain started. It was raining so hard that we had to raise our voices to talk. I went and looked out the door and stood there while the cool air blew in through the door. It's been really warm the last couple of days so the cool air felt really good. Then it started raining harder. It really looked like someone was pouring water out of a bucket. The water wasn't so much dripping or running off the house as it was just flowing in a steady stream. Then I heard hail hitting the AC unit in the living room. The power flickered a little at the same time and so we turned off the power strip on the TV because it kept kicking the tivo and dvr on and off. Then the power went off completely and the rain stopped shortly afterwards.

I went outside to assess the damage because I was really concerned about where the hell my trashcan wound up. I just knew it was going to be three streets over on someone's roof as hard as the wind was blowing. When I looked out the door once, the rain was coming down sideways. Jake finally looked at me and said, "Don't you think it's about time you CLOSE THE DOOR????" Which said to me - close the door or he'll close it for me and pull me away from it. I didn't think it was that dangerous - I mean it's just rain and a little wind. Sheesh what's the big deal?

After seeing what I've seen today, I think I'll listen to him. There was a tree limb (I noticed I forgot the important word LIMB here! Whoops!!) in my front yard that came down right next to his truck. It came within a foot of smashing his truck. The limb was a good 8 to 10 inches across the broken part. It landed on the power line to the house and literally yanked the meter off the outside wall. It pulled the wires down on the circuit box but didn't pull them out so we didn't have any live wires flopping around on the ground or anything. All in all I'm pretty lucky in that respect. We're pretty lucky it didn't hit the truck too.

We went out and took pics and (like the snow ones I've yet to put up) when I figure out how to upload them (or he gets them uploaded for me), I'll post them on here. The destruction was insane. A neighbor up the street lost her entire porch. It just fell like someone was pushing on the top. Another neighbor had a huge limb fall and puncture her roof. A huge oak tree (that my swing was in when I was little) fell in the yard next door where I grew up and narrowly missed a house. There are 100+ year old trees all over town that were just uprooted and knocked over.

I had no idea it was going to be that bad. They finally restored power at 2 am but I was sleeping soundly by that time. Jake told me that my neighbor next door had a tree uprooted and fell at the back of her house. She spends most of her time back there my mom says so it's a good thing it didn't land on the house. The house that took the most damage it appears is an empty trailer where no one is currently living. The house right up the street (maybe 50 yards away or so) had a huge old cedar tree in the yard. During the storm it snapped at the base and when I went outside after the storm the whole area smelled like the inside of a cedar chest.

When I was driving to work today, I passed several downed trees and saw a lot of debris everywhere but very little damage done to property except for the neighbor's porch falling in. We lost the bulletin board kiosk over in front of the post office. It just snapped the posts holding it up.

What a night! I wish the only thing that had happened was the ordeal with the meter but it wasn't.

I went into the bedroom to go to bed and stepped in water. I have window AC units and for those of you who don't know, you have to put something up between the window sill and the AC unit to block the great outdoors because they never make AC units to fit exactly in a window. Apparently, the wind was blowing so hard that it blew the spacing piece out and blew dirt, debris, grass and rain all over my bedroom. Fortunately I hadn't taken the heavy winter comforter and blanket off the bed so my mattress and sheets were dry. The bed skirt was drenched and so I had to take that off the bed too. I decided to heck with messing with it and draped the mess over the ironing board so maybe SOME of it would dry out a little. It didn't.

The whole night I was worried about the black cat and telling Jake I hoped that he was ok. He was. In the middle of the night he woke me up by jumping his dirty wet butt up in my bed and curling up next to me to dry himself off. So my sheets were dry through MOST of the night I guess.