Miscellaneous

The days after our tornado

We’ve had a pretty surreal couple of days. Waking up Friday morning and looking outside was numbing – our neighborhood looked like a warzone. The disaster relief and cleanup teams had rolled in Thursday night (to apply tarps to roofs and start securing homes), but waking up and seeing everything by the light of day was tough.

School was cancelled for Friday, so I planned on staying home that day, and I talked Rick into staying home for at least the morning. I didn’t know what we needed to do, but I felt it was best for us to stay home. He went for a pre-dawn run and when he got back, he had someone here to look at our roof. We didn’t think we had any damage but when the guy got up on the roof, there were about 4-5 areas on the roof that were missing shingles and there was a hole through the shingles. We also had some damage to the siding on the north side of our house that was obviously from flying debris. Rick’s car got pretty beat up too – but it was also minor compared to some of the blown out cars we’ve seen in our neighborhood.

Mid-morning, Rick & I took a tour of the neighborhood. Oh My Gosh.

We knew about the totally flattened house behind Amy & Bob’s house, and had heard from some friends that their house was pretty torn up.

But nothing prepared us for the devastation we’d see throughout our sub.

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The support that the Dexter community has been showing towards the victims is incredible. The local grocery store was serving up free lunch on Friday, and tonight there was dinner up at the parking lot of the car dealership near our house. The Dexter football and wrestling teams cut down and cleared out the tree the fell in our yard. Every morning folks are walking the street handing out water and donuts (which the kids aren’t able to say no to).

But none of that prepares you for seeing the cleanup crews working almost around the clock trying to rebuild your neighborhood. At 10p last night, there were bulldozers cleaning up debris and filling up dumpsters, which then big trucks would come in and haul out. I went outside at daybreak this morning, before all the crews really started showing up, and it almost looked like things were back to normal. But then the beeping and hammering started again.

At this point the only thing we are worried about is all the glass in our yard; I’ve done probably 50 laps, trying to be systematic and go back & forth to cover every inch, picking up glass. But I’m not exaggerating when I say that as soon as you turn around and walk back across a spot you just checked, you find another big piece of glass. Luckily none of the kids (or Cooper) have stepped (or fallen) on anything yet, and I’m pretty sure we’ll be finding it for a long time.

As details emerge about the size of the tornado, we are reminded (for the 100th time) that we were incredibly lucky.

Reports are that the tornado was 800 yards wide and on the ground for 7.2 miles; normally tornados are 50yds wide and on the ground for 1-2 miles. Winds topped out at 130-140 miles an hour. Hearing that makes me realize I was sort of dumb to run upstairs to see what was happening while the storm was going on.

But here is a map showing the path of the tornado. See that EF3 in the lower right corner? Yeah, that’s our sub.

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We just can’t forget how thankful we are that we were in our home when the alarms went off (and not driving home), and that Rick was actually home with us. I can’t imagine what could have been had this storm come in the middle of the night – I’m not sure if we’d have heard the sirens while we were sleeping.

Please keep our neighborhood and the other areas affected by this storm in your thoughts and prayers. A friend pointed out that we’ll never look at storm damage pictures the same way again. That’s the truth.