High Wind Advisory, My Behind
After a gorgeous Easter day Sunday, the clouds started to roll in around dinner time. It rained and poured from about midnight until half past midnight as I recall it. Then, the WIND started to blow. Blow sounds like such a puny word, because it blew from about 1:30 am until 3 am without really letting up. Now, I’ve come to expect gusts and blasts of wind preceding, during, and a little bit after a line of showers comes through, but this was different. It was like someone had turned on a giant fan and left it on high for an hour and a half. I kept listening for a tornado siren or the dead calm that comes before something disastrous so that I would have an excuse to grab the kids and hide in the basement, but neither came. Then I started hoping someone would wake up and want to come in our bed, but Gloria and Thomas just kept on sleeping.
So at 2:30ish Michael stirred and I sent him to go get my laptop so I could "check the weather" as though we would still have internet access after all the carrying on that was going on outside. He graciously fetched the device and informed me that the trees were blowing all over the place like he’d never seen before. He invited me to come look, but I was too chicken. It sounded that bad.
Surprisingly, we still had an internet connection, so I checked the weather to see that the rain was all definitely past us and that there was a "high wind advisory." Really? Because I needed "advice" about it? It was blowing like the dickens out there and all they could say was "high wind ADVISORY?" Not a warning-just an advisory? Tell me something I DON’T know. So, I clicked on the link to the "high wind advisory." Nothing.
"Michael, our internet looks like it just went out."
"Really? I’m surprised it worked at all."
"Um. Yes. Just now. No. Wait. Our network is down, too. That’s weird."
"Hey, Melissa."
"Yes?"
"The power’s out."
"Well then. That explains why the wireless network is down as well. Good thing my laptop has a battery for times like this."
Monday morning we all got dressed and went for a walk (Michael and Thomas had the day off already) to view the damage from the wind. It was so impressive we had to come back and get the camera for documentation purposes.
There is a cull-de-sac right around the corner from us. This is what we saw there:
Yes, that is a transformer on the ground, a downed tree, and that wooden thing sticking up is not a tree but the power pole where it snapped off.
We went a little further down the street and saw:
They were already replacing another power pole. If you look right across the street from the truck, you can see the top of the pole, complete with transformer in the neighbor’s driveway. The pole had snapped and the tension on the lines pulled the top half all the way across the street.
It’s not every day you see the top half of a power pole dangling across the street from where it should be!
They were "trapped" in their house by the mess in their driveway.
A little farther down the street we saw the culprit behind 3 snapped power poles was a tree that blew over into the road, snapping the first one, and causing a domino effect for two others:
Above you can see the guilty tree in the back and another downed power pole in the front. The tree fell so that it blocked the road completely, but it missed the mailbox by inches.
Here’s another look at the same tree. If you look closely, you can see ANOTHER pole being replaced on the other side of the same tree. It got the poles on either side of it, plus the one that flew across the street.
And across the street from the above:
No transformers this time, just a mess of lines. (I must point out for Thomas that this is the house where one of the "cafeteria ladies" from school lives.)
Down towards the end/beginning of our street we saw:
And right across the street was:
The top of the pole, with the transformer! Do you see a pattern here?
On another street that connects to ours a tree fell straight towards a freshly painted and newly re-roofed house:
Amazingly, the limbs didn’t break the windows or split the siding. Instead, they just flexed. They missed a car in the driveway by about a foot. I am glad for them!
In all, there were 8 poles that had to be replaced. There were 6 on our street and 2 more on a street that runs parallel (roughly) to ours. We had power restored around 3pm Tuesday afternoon. We do have phones back on, but no cable or internet service at this time. There are still dead transformers and lines all over the neighborhood. At least 3 people had their power meters ripped right off of their house. There were also several trees that got uprooted on our street. Thankfully, we had nothing more than some small sticks come down in our yard and we lost all the ice cream in our freezers. I guess the trees in our yard that were "weak" already came down earlier this year and we probably didn’t really "need" the ice cream anyway!
April 16, 2009 8:23 am | 
