Wind Storms

[mattbcl]

They suck. If you need proof, check this out:

The image in this story is just one of many that are now burned into my mind.

This storm woke me up at about 1 am last night. I stood in my house, as alone as I've ever felt, staring out the window and watching it rain and hail sideways. Wind whipped everything in view, and there wasn't that much of a view. Power cables jangled to and fro. I saw a couple of trees go down. I kept waiting for my landlord, who lives downstairs, to call me and invite me to hide in his basement with him, but the call never came - he and his girlfriend were in the Ozarks.

Since I work for a cleaning company, I had to leave home early. My street was almost entirely occluded by fallen trees - there was space enough on one side of the street for a single car to squeeze through. When I glanced back at my house, I don't recall seeing anything really noteworthy, other than a tree that had fallen off to one side.

When I got home today, I saw that a branch about as big around as I am is resting against the overhang of my porch. My yard is no longer a yard, but a tree exhibit, demonstrating all of the various sizes of branches and limbs, the insides, the outsides, and everything in between. Miraculously, I still have power. 25,000 residents of my city (population 42,000) do not.

When my landlord and his girlfriend pulled up, I was standing there gaping at the massive branch, which I could swear had not been there when I left this morning. He hunkered down, grabbed a chainsaw, and got to work right away, without so much as giving me a cross look or a word of discouragement. His girlfriend, on the other hand, had some very not-nice words for me. Her exact words were, "Matt, are you fucking BLIND?! How could you not SEE that? I mean seriously, are you fucking BLIND?!"

Notably, she did apologize to me a few minutes later, but confrontations like that really and truly bother me. I certainly never meant to ignore damage to the place I'm renting and living in - I want my landlord to know I care. I offered to help in any way I could, but he just shrugged and said, "Nah, don't worry about it, I got it taken care of. Just as long as you're okay and your place is fine."

People in various neighborhoods around town have been pitching in to help each other. In some other neighborhoods, though, some people are just sticking to themselves. It's tough in either category. I did my best to help a local granny whose insurance won't cover the removal of torrential waters in her basement with at least getting some branches away from her house and to the lawn, where local crews will grind them and take them away.

Has anybody else here been subjected to the sort of conditions, be they weather or interpersonal, which I've described here? What do you do? What WOULD you do?

Please discuss.

[crown34]

Back in 10' around October? I don't remember the exact date, but New York had really high winds, really similar to Tornado like. So a tree fell into the front yard smashing my dad'd car and blocking the door and the driveway.

[Magmar]

Last March, my state had the worst flood in its history. Think Minot North Dakota on a similar scale, major cities and much of the rural areas completely flooded under up to 22 feet of water. It was totally unprecedented. People around here don't have flood insurance. I sell things like bath fixtures & such so we had a lot of people coming to replace things in their home.

[Mikachu Yukitatsu]

I only hear and see this from the news, and they're always telling if there were Finns where natural disasters and other calamities occur. In addition to that, what I'd like to hear is whether or not there were TPMers where stuff like this takes place!

[Katie]

we had a storm about a year ago that picked up our glass patio table and threw it ~15ft into the yard. do you know how hard it is to clean glass up out of grass? apparently the damage in the area was so bad it was technically classified as a tornado (it was at night so nobody saw it though)

[Crystal Mew]

this is whats going on here:
http://www.koat.com/news/28362925/detail.html

my poor hometown

[Magmar]

omg! Do you have friends & family still there??

[Crystal Mew]

omg! Do you have friends & family still there??

pretty much everyone I grew up with still live there, a lot don't anymore though. I don't have family there, but its still sad and scary. Everyone supposedly evacuated, so hopefully everyone got out alright...

[Magmar]

It's so unpredictable and crazy. Does it rarely rain where you are?

[Crystal Mew]

It really doesn't rain all that much...we do have a monsoon season but it usually doesn't start till next month. I live in the desert so really the only natural disasters we have are fires. But people started this one, people are so freakin stupid.

And actually, Los Alamos had a bad fire about 11 years ago, and it burned down half the town..but that fire only got to be 40k acres and it took weeks to get that big. This one is already well over 65k acres and it started SUNDAY...as in 2 days ago. so yeah its pretty bad!

It gets super windy here, which definitely doesn't help

[Jeff]

We had a possible tornado pass right through my neighborhood a few weeks ago. I posted some pics of the destruction on Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?s...25708.15206272

The storm hit about midnight, woke us all up, and knocked out the power 'til about 10am. A whole bunch of trees lost most of their branches, including a big maple where all the kids on our street used to meet to trade Pokemon cards. It used to be huge, now there's almost nothing left of it. The wind also flipped our trampoline, which blew onto our clothesline pole and broke it off at the bottom. Luckily, other than a single branch from our tree, that was the only damage we took. Even the trampoline is somehow still in good shape. Our neighbors weren't so lucky.