While putting together the previous post, I also was watching the local TV weather guy reporting on an oncoming storm. It looked big, substantial and in some areas, downright nasty. Turns out, we got the nasty.
We headed inside to check the weather report again. S suddenly yelled to open the windows (we had the A/C on) to provide some pressure relief. As I opened the window, another gust blew by. The force of it felt downright scary. The rain was blowing sideways. S ran upstairs to open the windows on both ends of our gable-roof second story. I heard a curious "whooshing" sound and ran to the front door. When I opened the door, there was our street tree, suddenly embracing and enclosing our front porch and the aluminum awning over it. It had blown down on our house! I was stunned!
The rain continued to pour down, sideways, and the wind blew like you see on TV when they're showing hurricanes. Amazing! We wanted to go outside and see what our house looked like, but the rain and the lightning were too much ... so we waited.
We heard a voice yelling, ran to the front window and looked out. Our neighbor, Ryan, was standing there in a windbreaker and flip-flops, drenched. "Are you okay?" he asked. We ran out to join him, but didn't stay long; the rain was still too heavy. And the lightning was still too frequent, one or more strikes a minute.
After a while, we ventured out again, the rain lighter by now, and scoped out our fallen tree and damaged house. The front awning is definitely crunched on one side. The tree was literally lifted up, sod, roots and all, and laid down on our roof. There is a giant earthen bulge in the area between the street and the newly-laid concrete sidewalk, tree still attached to the bulge. Weird-looking!
By 8 or 8:30, we could hear chain saws going in the distance. Shortly after dark, we could see truck lights down at the end of our street. There was a tree across the road there. Just four houses north of us, another tree had been uprooted and laid across the street, grazing and damaging a brand-new Mercedes Benz and some other late-model car. With regard to that, I felt especially fortunate. While the storm was uprooting our tree, my car sat parked on the street, literally within three feet of the destroyed tree. Wow!
After the initial shock, the street acquired almost a party atmosphere. People were walking and bicycling by, stopping to take pictures of our tree and the other ones on our street with their cellphone cameras. People are funny! There were big truck rigs, burly guys with chain saws cutting up the trees blocking the road, the smell of diesel fuel and sawdust everywhere. We talked to city officials hurrying in in their official city pickups, hey, we've got a tree on our roof. They checked it out, said sorry, we've got worse situations that we need to take care of first. We'll be back later.
And they were. Around 3:30 this morning! Yup, a crew of at least 8 to 10 guys and one woman showed up at 3:30 and by 4:30 they were done. The tree was down, the big logs cut and piled alongside the street on the earthen bulge, and all the foliage and debris raked up and fed into a giant wood chipper. S was so envious. She said she'd love to have a chipper that size!
I headed to bed around 5 a.m. I was just starting to drift off when I heard these deep rumbling sounds. I touched S and said, "It's starting to thunder again."
"No," she said, "they're picking up the logs."
I ran to a front window, and sure enough, she was right. There was a huge truck with a giant claw attached to its back. A worker was maneuvering the claw to pick up each 4 to 6-feet-long log and drop it in the back of the truck. Hence, the deep rumbling sounds!
Finally, about 5:30 this morning, I fell asleep. What a night! It's one I won't forget for awhile, you can bet on that!
[I hope to post pictures tomorrow. For now, I'm pooped and still need to drive to the other house, the one with ALL the trees. Ha-ha.]
