Devastation

Last Wednesday we arrived home from a good family camping trip up the North Shore.  I drove YaYa to her oboe lesson.  I threw in a few loads of laundry and we unpacked most of our camping gear.  We were busy nestling back into our house, visiting with neighbors, catching up on tasks that had been put aside while we were gone.  I checked my email and took care of some things on the internet. I kind of remember seeing that there was a small chance of rain, but this summer there has been a small chance of rain almost every day, and it usually ends up raining even if the chance is small, so I didn’t think anything of it.  I don’t think anyone did. We all went to bed expecting a normal Thursday to happen the next morning.

With no warning to us (although some people did know of a severe thunderstorm warning issued in the middle of the night) we woke up at 3:30 in the morning to absolute constant thunder crashing and lightning so constant that we didn’t need lights.  This is is not the kind of rain we usually get in my city.  It was a prairie thunderstorm gone monstrous.  All of the sudden a ferocious wind hit, and Dr. Peds got up to move some things we had left on the deck inside, closing windows along his way.  Soon things were hitting the windows.  I thought it was hail at first, again not something we see often here, but a few minutes later I realized that what I was hearing were branches and trees cracking, falling, crashing.  YaYa came bounding into my room in alarm, noting that she thought the tree in front of her window had crashed.  We weren’t sure if it hit the house or not.  Another pine tree on the corner of our yard crashed seconds later and branches were flying everywhere.

The loss of our trees in the middle of the night made me sad.  I didn’t get back to sleep, and we couldn’t really tell what fell in the dark, because as soon as the crashing started we lost electricity.  I don’t think very many people in our neighborhood got back to sleep either.  People were trying to peer out of their windows with flashlights, and as the sky grew lighter before the sun rose, we all started venturing out of our houses and were astounded to find utter devastation in the entire neighborhood.  Over 50 gigantic trees were lost within a 2 block radius from my house, and  those are just the trees I could see and count; there were undoubtably more.

Everyone was out, wandering around the streets in absolute shock.  All through the experience, neighbors have been helping neighbors and supporting each other in all sorts of different ways.

This is what my front yard looked like:

Two big pine trees down, two gigantic branches from our boulevard trees, and they managed to smash 3 of our baby trees in the front yard. 

The pine trees somehow miraculously missed our house and our neighbor’s apple orchard across the street. 

Every street was blocked in many, many places.  A city state of emergency was declared, no travel allowed.  This is what my street looked like:

I felt particularly terrible for this house, which ended up with three trees on the roof.

Lots of cars looked like this.  We park our cars in our driveway, and miraculously there were four trees that could have fell on them, but none did.  

City crews started unblocking streets as fast as they could, carving a path.  By the late afternoon most streets were drivable again.  The storm ushered in a horrific heat wave, but everyone started sawing and hauling branches as best as they could .  Power lines were down all over.  Hardly any lines were actually intact.  Electric poles were snapped off.  It was crazy, and we all knew we wouldn’t have electricity for a LONG time.

The truth is, it’s not that hard to live without electricity, as long as you have running water, which we did.  We even had hot water, since our water heater runs on natural gas.  Everyone was worried about our refrigerators and freezers, though, especially since it was so hot.  After instructing all of our kidlets not to open the refrigerator under any circumstance whatsoever, we actually chained the doors together so they wouldn’t forget and only opened the fridge at mealtimes, hastily, rushing in to get whatever we needed.  The fridge stayed cold for about 2 days, and the fridge freezer made it 3 days.  On Sunday someone from church who got power back a bit earlier (75000 people were without power) offered to let me bring some things to her freezer, so we liquidated the kitchen freezer, which mostly held frozen fruit for smoothies, along with a few other miscellaneous things.  Someone else from church who had just gotten power back offered us their generator, which we gratefully accepted to run our big chest freezer keeping our meat cold.  That freezer was full, which helped it stay cold, and I’m super grateful that we didn’t loose any meat.  The generator brought down my anxiety level greatly.  By Sunday night most of our neighborhood seemed to be running a generator of some sort for their freezer.

We had heard that we would probably be without power until Friday, but miraculously on Monday electricity was restored to our house and just a couple others who had lines intact still from a certain pole that was not snapped.  Many houses had the electric lines ripped right out of the side of their houses.  I felt a little guilty on Monday night, working in my house with the lights on while my neighborhood was still DARK in almost every direction.  On Tuesday our street was crawling with electrical crews, and several more houses got electricity back as well.

It was kind of interesting what I missed most when we didn’t have electricity.  In part, I did miss my computer and being connected to the world, but in other ways, it was kind of a nice break from technology.  I missed staying up late to read or practice, but I also enjoyed long nights of sleep.  I worried a lot about our food spoiling, but in the end we hardly ended up wasting anything (thanks to the generator friends).  It would have been nice to have fans running in the heat, but we made do.  The most surprising thing that I missed was actually the garbage disposal!  I never would have guessed.  Our kitchen sink is constructed in a way that made it very hard to drain without the garbage disposal spinning things to oblivion, no matter how hard we tried to keep chunks of things from going down the drain.

Overall, although I am sad about loosing so many beautiful trees in my neighborhood and yard, it was really just an inconvenience and expense for us (we paid a tree service to help with our downed trees).  When I looked at the devastation around me, it quickly became evident that we were super blessed not to have any trees hit our house or cars, to still have running water, and that most importantly, no one was hurt.  The sirens did not go off, so we didn’t realize the storm was as dangerous as it was until the sun came up hours later.