Tornados, and Earthquakes, and Hurricanes....Oh My!

Old news now, but last week we had our first East Coast earthquake--5.8.  Very exciting.  Don't tell my old elementary school principal, Mr. Allred, but I didn't put into use any of the training from the many, many earthquake drills we had back then.  But maybe I can blame that on there not being any desk immediately available to duck under.  Instead I just sat on the bench in my kitchen where I was sorting mail and wondered if this was an earthquake or if Max was just running around upstairs instead of cleaning his room like I'd instructed.  I only had to go and check Facebook to know for sure!  No, just kidding--I checked the usgs.gov site.  Wow, it's amazing how quickly information can be available these days--and all while I stayed sitting on the kitchen bench and looking it up on my phone.  I love living in the future!

favorite pic going around the web describing the earthquake's impact.  source unknown.

But to up the ante, last weekend we met Irene--our first hurricane.  And since we (thankfully) had no power loss, resulting flooding, or tree damage, I can look back on it and say that it was also quite the exciting adventure.  We spent Saturday prepping for the storm: clearing toys/bikes/scooters out the yard, finally weeding the front planting beds so we could spread out the remainder of the mulch pile that had been at the top of the driveway since June, tying down garbage cans, baking bread and brownies and banana muffins,  finishing laundry, and generally doing anything else that would need doing in the event of several days without power.  I can't believe how much we got done. We even had our back-to-school dinner, got the kitchen completely cleaned up, and kids to bed early, so that we could get watching The Two Towers while waiting for the storm to roll in.  Frankly, I should be threatened with a hurricane every weekend.

But the biggest news around my neck of the woods was not Irene or the earthquake, but our very own local (albeit small) tornado.  And, as with earthquakes, I apparently have no idea how to follow natural disaster instructions/recommendations, and I stood at our glass-paned front door and front room windows with my friends and our cumulative twelve children and watched as the sky darkened and the heavy rain started to blow sideways.  Then it really looked like the wind and rain were coming right down my street and branches started falling from the trees--lots of them.  We watched one especially large limb take out the power lines in the front yard, knocking out the power.  Turns out, there was a tornado watch in effect for that day, I just had no idea.  When the rain cleared about an hour later (and it was gorgeous and sunny), we went out to survey the neighborhood.  The result was a lot of carnage.....including, unfortunately, my friend Melinda's car that had been sitting in my driveway.  All I can think to say is what a headline in the good ole' Provo Herald read once after a major storm that happened when I was in high school:  Microburst; Macrodestruction.  I like to say that catchy little title the way that an announcer at a monster truck rally would read it.   I'm tempted to add about a half-dozen exclamation points to that so that it sounds right.

This is from the tree in our front yard.

Here's the view from our driveway into the neighbor's backyard.

Uh, oh....the van.

This is the house across the street.  When they came home, they found a branch from a tree in the front yard that had gone right through the back of the house and into their bedroom.

This was a huge surprise.  It's one of the neighbors on another street.  They had all three of their cars smashed too.  It ended up that a total of 3 houses in the neighborhood were damaged so badly by trees that the county declared them condemned.

Luckily no residents were hurt at all.

Here's a link to the article the local paper had about the storm.  The biggest news from the article is that apparently our neighborhood is considered "upscale."  Thank goodness, because I certainly would never live anywhere that wasn't upscale......so, phew!  

And, with tomorrow being the last day of August, it's the end of a very exciting natural disaster month.  My dad suggested that we name our new baby-to-be Irene.  Tempting.....but, no.