Tuesday's Tornado

I don't know what to say.  The whole experience is still a little surreal.  Each morning I wake up to birds chirping and everything sounding fine until I go outside and relive the destruction.

On Tuesday, at approximately 5:05 p.m., I shuddered at work as I watched dark green clouds fill the sky and the words "Tornado Warning" light up everyone's cell phone.  All my coworkers and I wondered if we should seek a safe place to hide as we saw strong winds, lightening, and hail burst from the clouds through the atrium glass window.  We were scheduled to begin an award ceremony in an hour, and we wondered if the award recipients and their families were now in jeopardy as they were most likely driving to our campus.

The storm ended about a half an hour later with little to no visible damage.  Those that drove and braved the storm had stories to tell about traffic and fallen trees, but we dusted ourselves off thinking that was the worst of it.

After the ceremony ended, I tried calling my mom only to learn that her landline was out of service.  I then called my husband to learn that he couldn't reach home.  Both sides of our road were blocked, and emergency crews gave us the bad news that no one would be able to get to their homes that night.  On the contrary, no one would be able to leave their homes that night either.

I panicked, but what could I do?  My mom left me a quick message with her cell phone to say that she and Little Lewie were okay, but after that message, she wasn't picking up the phone anymore.  I stayed over a coworker's house and attempted to drive home that morning.  Still no luck....

On Wednesday evening, reality hit.  The news reported that an F1 Tornado touched down in our town and then traveled another 9.5 miles, leaving behind a path of destruction.  The Tornado came ripping through our road, and trees and telephone poles either snapped like toothpicks or were uprooted like removing candles from a birthday cake.  The woods behind our house was destroyed.  Our trampoline and swing set took flight and then smashed.  Favorite trees in our yard came down.

Our driveway

Trees in our yard.

Trees that came down from across the street.

Our missing trampoline.

Remnants of our swing set and trampoline.

Trees from the woods by our garage.

When the emergency crews and construction vehicles finally allowed Lew and I to drive home, I couldn't help but cry over the war zone that was once our beautiful neighborhood.  There was car damage, house damage, and everything in-between.  Words can't explain how I felt when I was finally able to hug my mom and son.  They had lived through a tornado!  The storm I saw at work was nothing in comparison to what they had been through.  My mom said she heard what sounded like a freight train, and then she and my son immediately climbed into the closet underneath the stairs.  (We don't have a basement.)  The house shook, the storm windows blew into her bedroom, and her bedroom door kept on banging fiercely as now the wind and air pressure started popping out ceiling tiles in the kitchen.  It was the scariest five or six minutes of their lives, and as you can imagine, my son was beside himself--crying, shaking, and hyperventilating.  (He still doesn't want to fully talk about it.)

The following are pictures of our road  just a few houses down from us (after two full days of cleanup...)  Most of our town and surrounding towns look just like this.

Now that the cleanup has begun, I am both thankful and upset.  We are blessed because we are all safe, and our home was spared.  I am upset, however, because the cleanup will take many, many years before we can forget, and even then, there will still be a scarred landscape.  My son has now lived through a freak ice-storm, several blizzards, two hurricanes, and now a tornado in his nine years of life.  This is not normal.  Climate change is real, and I'm afraid for Little Lewie's future.  I wish climate change wasn't part of a political platform.  It's not a Democrat issue or a Republican one--it's a human one.  The human element in all of this cannot be ignored.

Our electricity is back up and school is scheduled to begin again on Monday, but more severe thunderstorms are scheduled for tomorrow.  I will do my best to comfort my little guy, and my mom and I might need a little comforting too.