Tornado Damage! BOO!

A tornado (level 1) blew through my county on Tuesday night. This was quite honestly the scariest thing I’ve ever been through. We do not have tornados I grew up! I noticed that the sky was getting dark when I got home from work, but I thought we were just in for a rain storm. No big deal. So, I came inside, got a snack, and promptly laid down to watch the four weeks worth of SVU I had saved to my Tivo.

I noticed the thunder and lightning outside, and I noticed that it had gotten really, really dark outside, but I still thought it was just another heat storm. Then, I heard a siren, but again, as I am not familiar with this process, I thought it was a fire truck. About twenty minutes or so later, the closet lights in the bedroom started to dim. There didn’t seem to be any sort of power surge with the tv, so again, I thought nothing of it, even thoug the lights kind of creeped me out.

Then, very suddenly, almost all at the same time, the lights went totally out, I heard a loud CRACK! followed immediately by a BOOM! and the sound of glass breaking. By the time I got to the hallway, I could hear water rushing in the house! I ran into the kitchen (my beautiful, recently remodeled kitchen!) and promptly stepped in the glass I had heard breaking! Found it! Since it was dark, I couldn’t see it. I thought it might’ve been a window, but it was only a candle. (Thank God! It could’ve been worse!)

I called DH and told him to leave the dog at camp and get home because there a tree had just hit our house. I still didn’t know that there had been a tornado but he told me that we were under a warning. I asked him what to do and he said “Call 911.” Why, I don’ t know. There was absolutely nothing that 911 could do for me. Nothing. Especially when we live so close to the neighboring county that my cell phone relays to the neighboring county’s 911 dispatch center.

While I was waiting to be connected to the correct county’s 911 center, I crouched in the bathtub with a pinching pain in my foot. It took six times for the incorrect county to dial my county’s 911 and let the phone ring until it stopped before my county was able to answer my call. That added up to the scariest 30 minutes of my life. I was totally alone and sitting in a dark bathtub shaking and about to pee myself hoping that my brand new floors wouldn’t ruin! I kept asking the 911 operator if I could get out of the tub yet and she kept saying “Just stay where you are!” (Oddly enough, as soon as I was connected to my county’s 911 center, that operator told me that if I felt comfortable enough, I could leave my house if I wanted to. Good thing the storm was mostly passed since that’s exactly what I did!)

The major storm had gone, so I grabbed towels out of the closet and tried to soak up as much water as I could, but it just kept coming in the ceiling. I was petrified. We spent so many hours redoing these floors ourselves that I couldn’t bear to have a section of them ruined! It’s not even that they’re anything expensive or overly fancy, but the process of redoing the entire floor in the whole house and having to rip out the kitchen to do it made me want to vomit!

I heard my neighbors outside so I went out to join them and we surveyed the damage in our cul-de-sac. My neighbor H got the glass shard out of my foot. My house was the second one hit. The others had trees/limbs fall, but only my house and one other were actually hit by trees (just in our cul-de-sac, though. The rest of our neighborhood is spotted with houses covered in tarps since they, too, lost part of their roofs). His house was karate-chopped by a falling pine. Luckily, he wasn’t home so his truck wasn’t in the garage (the place that sustained the most damage). I have never seen so much carnage before.

The sad part is that there’s nothing you can really do to prepare for something like this. Sure, you can have generators and flashlights and candles on hand, but you can’t stop a tornado from happening. Cutting down all the trees in the yard is still no guarantee that I won’t end up over the rainbow someday.

These are some of the better shots DH got of our house with his camera phone. I got some too, but have no way to get them to the computer (or at least can’t figure out how!). These pictures look a lot better than it felt on Tuesday. After seeing all of the other houses in my area, I know it could’ve been much worse and I am very thankful that it wasn’t.

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.
–John Howard Payne