Wednesday, May 30, 2007

You Don't Need A Weatherman To Tell Which Way The Wind Is Blowing

The county was under a severe weather warning along with both a tornado and a flash flood watch last night. At about 6:30 PM the storm roared in. Winds gusting up to 70 mph slammed into the the south side of our house causing the building to vibrate and papers to fly off the dining room table. I ran around closing all the windows and could see above the roofs of the houses across the alley what looked like a fog racing toward me. I ran to close the garage door. After bits of grit stung my arms and hands while I rolled the door shut I realized what I thought was fog was really dirt mixed with light rain. When I got back into the house I looked out the window and saw small tree branches, twigs, and leaves tumbling in the dirty air. The loudest noise was the roar of the wind along with the sound of leaves rattling in the trees. The trees were doing a violent dance with the wind and I worried about them crashing into the house.

Then a movement on the street caught my eye and I was shocked to see a young woman in the middle of the intersection about a block away struggling against the wind while holding a baby stroller in her arms. She was trying to run but was making no headway against the wind. I grabbed the truck keys and ran out into wind to my truck. Just as I got within half a block of the woman another car raced across the intersection and stopped next to her. The driver jumped out and helped her put the stroller and baby in the backseat of the car and then they both quickly climbed in too and the car took off. I drove back home, parked, and fought my way against the wind to my front door. When I opened it the wind blew me inside.

It was a weird wind. One that seemed to be blowing in all directions at once. When I got inside I found out the power had gone off. Since there was nothing to do but watch the wind, that is what I did. After about a half-hour the wind died down and a steady rain started falling. The thing that seemed strange at the time was how quiet it seemed once the wind stopped. A city truck came out of the alley across the street and started slowly down our alley. My husband said that anytime the town looses power the city sent trucks up and down the alleys and streets looking for fallen tree branches on the lines. It turned out we had a tree branch on the line in our alley and other fallen branch on the line that connected the power from the main line to a neighbor's house.

After a bit I heard a chain-saw and put my coat and rain boots on and went outside. The air was clean, cold and refreshing, the way it always is after a big storm. Down the alley a city "reach trunk" (the kind with a extendable basket) was stopped and a workman up in the basket was sawing through a limb that lay on a section of power-line. It is amazing how quickly watching someone saw wood becomes boring and after a bit I went home. Since there was nothing else to do until the power came back on I started picking up all the storm debris laying in my yard. When I started my yard looked like two giants had played a game of Fifty-two Card Pick-up using small branches, large twigs, and clumps of leaves instead of playing cards. When I finished I had one wheelbarrow full of green matter piled in the alley. This morning I pick-up another barrow load.

Today I found out that a tornado had passed just west of town last night. I also found out that a couple of houses had trees fall over but luckily neither tree hit either one of the houses. The sound of chain-saws was in the air for most of the day as people and city crews were busy cutting up all the tree limbs that had fallen into yards and into the streets last night. When I rode my bike around town checking out the damage I was not surprised to find most of the streets had piles of tree limbs lying near the curbs where people had dragged them for pick-up when the city can get around to it.

All in all, we were lucky.

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