Our Luck Ran Out Last Tuesday Morning

Well, after a bizarre year of weather and serious weather so very close to home and us being spared, our luck finally ran out this past Tuesday shortly after midnight. While we didn't get hit with a tornado or massive amounts of rain causing catastrophic flooding, we did receive some of the wildest storms I have ever been thru in all my years.

Lying in bed around midnight Monday night, I heard continuous, and I do mean continuous thunder off to our west. It was several miles away, but I was amazed at how it just continued without breaks. My wife, who I truly believe could sleep thru Armageddon was lying next to me, and I asked her very softly if she was awake. She answered me that she was.

I asked her if she had been listening to the thunder, which she had, and I told her at that time that if this storm didn't weaken, we were in for a heller.

It didn't weaken one bit.

Within ten minutes, deafening thunder, still continous, was booming. Constant lightning which reminded me of a strobe light was flashing, the wind was blowing fiercely and the rain was pouring down. Lying on the bed and looking up at the ceiling, I couldn't believe my eyes. The lightning made the fan look like it was indeed in the beam of a strobe light and it appeared to be stopped although it was running on high.

I tried lying there closing my eyes, but they wouldn't stay shut because of the ferocity of the lightning and thunder. At times our bedroom was totally lit up like a lamp was on. In a matter of moments, our power was out and we were without electricity for the next two hours.

The storm seemed to go on and on and on, which I guess it actually did. About the time it seemed it was going to let up and stop, another wave would take the place of the one that had just gone thru.

Around 2:30 AM our power came back on, so the wife and I reset our alarm clocks so we wouldn't oversleep the next morning for work.

At 4AM, our power was out again, this time for another hour.

With alarms reset with less than half an hour before getting up for the day, needless to say we neither got much sleep thru the night.

After my shower I went outside to see how much rain was in our rain gauge. As I dumped the 1.95 inches of rain out, I noticed our lawn chairs on the back porch were tipped over, moved about five or six feet, and I remembered I had two chairs out in the front yard that were probably blown over into our neighbors yard, so I went to retrieve them.

That was when I knew much more than chairs had been moved.

Three large tree limbs had fallen from one of our cottonwood trees, one over thirty foot long. Two more, probably in the vicinity of 20 feet in length had also fallen. Bark lay everywhere. If you've ever had a cottonwood tree, you probably know all you have to do is breathe on one of them and they lose limbs, bark and leaves immediately. The hill that is our front yard was covered with debris from the trees.

I started looking around and realized it wasn't just our lot that was messed up, but every neighbor I looked at had limbs down. As I walked back around the house, I saw leaves and limbs covering the road to the west of our property.

It wasn't until I made the 8 mile drive to work that I discovered that entire drive to work showed me nothing but more of the same. Actually, the closer I got to Rushville where I work, the more I saw that was damaged.

Rushville had lost power as well during the night, parts of it would be without electric until mid afternoon Tuesday. Tree limbs were down the entire drive to town, in town trees were down, not just in yards, but on homes, cars and blocking the streets.

It was estimated that the winds early Tuesday morning were in excess of 85 miles an hour and were straight line winds out the northwest. Considering what I saw, I believed it.

Needless to say, the weather was the topic of conversation all day at work. My day started off very slow but picked up as the day went on. I heard more and more stories of damage and fear all day long. One thing most people agreed on was that it was the most violent non-tornadic storm they had ever been thru.

I know of no injuries or loss of life, but some of the damage is extremely extensive. We're talking an area over ten miles in length that faced the brunt of these unbelievably strong straight line winds. The length of the storm was also very long, lasting several hours with very little breaks in the action.

I'm thankful things were not worse than they were and I'm thankful we all came thru this one as well as we did, but I sure as hell hope I never have to go thru another one like this.