We had 60-mile-per-hour straight-line winds during a thunderstorm last week. I knew the approaching storm was going to be intense because of the bow shape on the radar return. My husband was snoring away as it approached just after midnight, but I had been unable to fall asleep. I figured I’d know when the storm was upon us by the intensity of the thunder and lightning, however there was remarkably little of that. But boy, was that wind scary. I could hear it howling in the distance as it got closer. The sound got louder and louder and then tree debris started smacking into the side of our house. Within moments the power pulsed on and off several times. I was worried about some of our appliances getting fried in a power surge, so I ran around the house unplugging things while the wind howled. Unlike a typical thunderstorm where the strong winds die down after the first 30 seconds or so, this wind event lasted several nerve-wracking minutes. When lightning did flash I could see trees, shrubs and all my flowers swaying violently as plant debris flew through the air.
Twenty minutes later the storm finally subsided and we crawled back into bed. The next morning we awoke to find that the power was still out. When I opened the front shades, I was astonished to see that most of my storm-battered plants in the front yard looked pretty good. I was expecting a mess. There was a woman across the street walking her dog and I watched her stop in her tracks and start snapping photos with her iPhone. Okay, that was not a good sign. I stepped out into the front yard among chunks of leaves and many sticks and small branches, but our giant oak tree was still standing. Whew! I looked further up the street and couldn’t see anything. That’s when I asked my husband if we could go on a little drive around the neighborhood to snoop. We didn’t even get a block before we saw this:
A very large oak came down in the storm and several huge limbs blew onto my neighbor’s house. There were trees and large branches down all over the neighborhood. My phone didn’t focus on the right thing in this photo, but scenes like this from another nearby residence were common:
Considering our yard is surrounded by 70-foot oaks and hickories and several of them have indications of rotting trunks at the ground level (they’re not ours so we can’t do anything about it), we’re very thankful that we were spared from any damage. On our little drive we had to whip a U-turn on several streets because trees were blocking the road.
When we returned home I went into the backyard to assess the damage to my flowerbeds. Considering how wicked the wind was I was relieved when I saw that most plants were still standing. Some of my lilies were snapped off at the ground (time to make a vase arrangement!) and many tall plants were whipped sideways, but they were still salvageable. I spent the next hour propping up, staking and tying plants and picking up sticks. Right now my flowerbeds resemble a championship soccer team posing for a photo. From a distance all you see is smiling faces, but if you get too close you notice lots of bruises, bandages and braces. As I cleaned up I just kept telling myself, “You do not have a tree lying on your house. You do not have a tree lying on your house.”
As I was bending down to grab a downed lily, I heard a huge CRACK and the power lines above my head started swinging wildly up and down. I dropped everything and made a run for the house. I called the utility company and even though I was scared to death with heart pounding I was amused to find that one of the menu options on their automated answering service was “I heard a loud crack.” So that’s the menu option I chose, and then I hung up. A few moments later a utility employee appeared in the neighbor’s backyard. I assume he was already in the area when I made my call–things don’t move THAT fast around here. I asked him what on earth had happened. He said something about a fuse or perhaps even the entire transformer exploding, and then he told a neighbor standing closer to him to get out of his yard because there was both an electrical and fire danger. Then he strung red “danger” tape around 3 different yards. I couldn’t see the transformer or any of the utility poles from my yard.
All this time I was under the impression that the tree that had fallen on the house up the street was to blame for the power outage and the loud crack. My next-door neighbor came out of his house shortly after the “crack” to tell me that the utility company had tried to restore the power, but when they turned it back on the tree began to smoke heavily and his wife had called 911 concerned that there would be a fire.
Later that afternoon we STILL didn’t have power and I was getting a little frustrated wondering why they couldn’t just take the damaged house off the grid from the rest of us. That’s when I opened our east-facing window and noticed yet another damaged tree in a different neighbor’s lawn and this one was lying directly on the power lines. Suddenly the loud crack, the smoking tree story, the wildly-swinging utility wires and the fact that we still had no power made a lot more sense.
Because there was so much tree damage in our neighborhood, a tree-cutting crew couldn’t even get to our area until late afternoon. We were very happy to see them and some of us sat just outside the danger tape area and watched them remove the large limbs.
After the limbs were removed and the utility wires were freed we hoped the power would soon return, but it took another several hours. When it finally did come on (to cheers!) it was time to open the refrigerator and freezer. After 19 hours without power, it wasn’t a pretty sight. To add insult to injury I had just done my weekly grocery shopping the day before. As I tossed and poured out and recycled containers I just kept saying to myself, “You don’t have a tree lying on your house. You don’t have a tree lying on your house.”