I woke yesterday to my weather radio making that hideous sound, if you have a weather radio you know what I mean. It was a severe thunderstorm warning. The storm was moving at 60 mph and bearing down on my lil town, packing 70 mph winds and a ton of rain and lightning. The announcer on the weather radio was even so kind as to tell me what time to expect the storm, 5:20a. I'm normally visiting my fav website (here) and drinking my coffee at that time of the morning. I figured that I would have a lil time to read what was going on here before I had to shut my PC down and wait the storm out.
At 5:15 all hell breaks loose. The power goes out and the wind hits with a force that I've never seen here before. At 5:20 the neighbor's (north of me) tree falls on my house and we're headed for the basement. At 5:30 it's all over. We go outside to see what the damage is. Leaves and branches ALL over the place and the tree on my house.
I get up on the roof to survey the damage but with the tree covering so much I can't tell if the roof is torn up or not. I notice that part of the tree is lying across the power lines that feed my house and I know that I need to get that taken care of right away, before the power comes back on. I get the hand saw and pruning shears and go to work; the chain saw will have to wait a bit. I get the lines cleared just in time as the power came back on around 7:00a.
But the drama wasn't over yet. It seems that my other neighbor (east of me) had part of his tree fall across some power lines and the tree is now on fire. We hear some popping sounds and my wife goes to take a look, then the transformer explodes. She's near panic and calls 911. This neighbor works 2nd shift and he's still in bed, or was till the transformer blew. He stumbles out of his house looking like he's having a heart attack! The first responders arrive and we direct them to our neighbor. The transformer that blew was near his bedroom window and it seems that when it blew it woke him up and he thought that the world was ending. The EMTs check him out and determine that he was just having a panic attack.
Time for the chain saw. I cut and cut, for 5 hours I cut. It's a miracle, no damage to my roof! After another 3 hours of clean up and the yard is back in shape.
Needless to say, I didn’t go into work yesterday.
Not a good start to the day but it could have been much worse.
