Tornado

I never thought that I would be able to say that a tornado hit the town where I lived.  I figured the one that hit my grandparent's house a few years ago would be as close as I ever got & that was just fine with me.  On Monday morning that changed.

We arrived home from vacation on Sunday evening at 5:00 and got ourselves someone settled back into our house.  Everything was inside except for the pool toys which were still a little damp and so I  put them on the table on the back patio to dry. 

Between 5 & 5:15 Nick and I woke up to hard rain and what we thought was hail.  We noticed that the electricity was flickering and eventually went out.  We both dozed in and out until we got out of bed in the morning.  Sometime between then and 6:30 Rebecca woke up screaming because their basement bedroom was pitch black and Nick went outside to visit the neighbors and assess the damage.  At that point we all thought that is was just straight line winds.

This is what we found out later in the day.  An EF1 tornado came through town with absolutely no warning.  What Nick and I thought was hail was actually our neighbors tree branch landing our our roof.  The wind eventually took the branch off our roof and put it on our neighbor's roof.  My parent's (who live diagonally across the street from us) lost a huge branch out of their tree and the wind carried it to our driveway preventing us from getting out of our driveway.  We lost a few shingles and we are not sure what will have to be done about that, but that was the extent of our damage.

Many people in town had water in their basement.  (Thanks to dear friends we borrowed a generator to keep our sump pump running and the water out of our basement.)  Trees all over town are thinner or completely gone.  All together 3 of our neighbors lost 6 huge pine trees.  Sheds, fences, and patios were damaged, but no homes sustained major damage.  A storage building near our home lost a chunk of the building and is now condemned and the debris from the building knocked over headstones in the cemetery and was spread all over the cemetery and football field.  (A little even made it to our yard.)

We are so thankful that it was not any worse.  You look at pictures of Joplin, MO and hear the stories from there and you realize just how blessed we were.  No warning, everyone asleep in their bed and no one was hurt.  Thank you Lord for your protective hand.

 This is our neighbor's to the west.  Those two trees were probably between 25-30 years old.  I now understand why they went to the basement.

 From our front step, cleaning up the 2 pine trees.  We can now see our neighbors two houses down!

 The pile of branches left in mom and dad's front yard.  Someone took the large pieces of the stump, but left the branches.  I didn't get a good picture of it across our driveway.  To many things going on at that time!

 Where the branch feel from.  They also have some that are still hanging in the tree.  They are talking about taking the whole tree down.  The ice storm a few years ago and now this tornado have taken a huge toll on this tree.

 The neighbors to the west from my parent's garage.  It looks like it did when I was growing up and the pine trees were just little!

 Our neighbor to the east watching the tree company take care of his debris.  It was their tree branch that landed on our roof and the blew over to their house.

   A little hard to see, but we all had leaves, grass and junk stuck to the south and west sides of our houses.