I had a really great time working out in the morning, while it lasted. Actually, I really do plan to keep up my morning workouts, maybe I’ll even work out this morning. But I have been derailed a bit.
Wednesday I had a fantastic morning workout. Then I came home from work where the girls and I literally walked in the door 2 seconds before a torrential down pour. The tornado sirens started going off about 4:00 so we were hiding out in the basement closet and listening to the loud noise of something pelting our house. After the sirens stopped we went upstairs to find this:
It’s hard to see but all those white flashes of light are hail.
The biggest hail we’ve ever had in this house, for sure. It was bizarre because it only hailed in the back yard. Out front (where our car was parked) had only a few pieces of hail. Only one of them hit our car, so I counted us lucky.
When Dave got home we went out for dinner, and on our drive home got reports of more storms on the way. So, we went home and turned on the TV where all programming had stopped in favor of covering the storms on the way. They kept telling us that there was a storm headed for us, and that the radar showed clear rotation. The weather forecasts were actually astonished at how clear the rotation was on the radar, apparently it was uncanny. So naturally we were kind of freaking out (privately…didn’t want to freak out the kids!)
Around 8:00 the sirens sounded again and we were back in the closet, listening to hail pound our house, and debris crashing around. This time the hail was baseball sized. It was already dark, so I didn’t take any pictures. Also, we glued ourselves to the TV because a) we thankfully still had power and b) they were reporting a tornado in my tiny town. It had gotten dark, so news crews (who are stationed 2 hours from us) couldn’t make it in time to get pictures or aerial footage.
We were very lucky, we had no damage to our home. The hail got our cars this time, so we have some good sized dents and dings in both cars, but other than that we were really lucky.
At 10:15 the sirens sounded yet again. We were in the closet for an hour this time, and about 10:30 the power finally cut off so were in the dark except for the light of a flashlight.
It was a SCARY night, seriously. We were up (kids and all) past midnight.
Thursday we were still without power until about lunchtime. There was definitely no morning treaddy time. When I went in to work I was able to check out the news and see that there was a confirmed EF-2 tornado in our town, about 5 miles east of our neighborhood. Thankfully, it was in a less populated area, so the destruction was minimized, but there were still several houses that were completely flattened and 12 injuries reported. But, no casualties, which is a blessing.
The 10:15 tornado warning produced an EF-1 tornado north of us, which flattened a neighborhood, but thankfully only caused 8 injuries and again, no casualties.
Driving past the devastation is heartbreaking. But it is amazing to see huge cars and trucks, flipped on their sides, picked up and moved from their driveways, bent and broken…houses flattened to a pile of rubble…and yet to know that somehow the people inside were left mostly untouched.
Wow! That is so scary. I've never seen hail that huge before! I guess when they say "golf ball sized hail" they aren't exactly exaggerating!
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