Tornado!

It had been a lovely late afternoon session of pool walking and I was cooled and relaxed as I came in the door. I was greeted with Steve informing me he had news, really big news. Since the dog needed to go out, I told him I'd do that and them be ready to listen but first , could he tell me, good news or bad?

Bad. Really bad.

The next few  minutes had me wondering what could possibly be that bad. My mind immediately went to somebody in the family having an accident, another stroke, another miscarriage.... Possibilities were endless. So was the dog's perusal of the back yard, as a puppy had been brought in just a few days ago and she diligently sniffed deeply and from all sides where he'd done his thing in her territory (!!!) before she finally covered it up as dogs do. Again.

As I finally sat down, he informed me Jessica had called, a friend from back in Minnesota. She's an endless source of medical disasters, and we tend to take them in our stride, be as supportive as possible from 1800 miles away until we head up in the summer and can spend time in person, and do what we can to help her cope. What could be worse enough that he prefaced his information that way?

A tornado had hit their house, putting a tree limb through it, destroying the ramp she needs to get in and out, but mainly sending somebody's roof through her front windows! Further, she informed him that it had also hit the town my son Paul lives in, Shafer, before going on into Wisconsin. On the bright side, all her family were OK. The boys had been sent home from school because an earlier storm that morning had taken out the power to the high school - a logical result of all the power lines out on the county road fronting the high school being on the road fronting the high school.

Once he finished telling me what he knew, adding she'd gone to bed (time zone difference) and I shouldn't call until morning, I put in a likely pointless call to Paul to find out how he and the house and yard had fared. Paul doesn't answer his phone, When he gets home from work, it goes on the table with his keys, and he heads down to a back room to play one of those video games where various avatars form teams and battle other teams, etc. While he's doing that, nothing else is important. So, either that, or he was out doing what he could as damage control to house and yard. No way to know. Not then.

I had the choice of calling the local sheriff's department, the phone number long memorized, but I was sure they would be swamped with really important calls, and I'd be an unwelcome bother. I decided to call the city clerk in the morning to see what the local damage was. She's somebody I've known since back to my Mayoral days, when she was employed as assistant city clerk. We'd also shared about an hour up in a 104 foot high aerial bucket back in the 1990s, me with a city camera getting photos of a joint fire department exercise, she invited because her husband was the one from the other town's fire department who was running their aerial. One of our town's residents had an old house needing to be demolished, and invited the fire departments to do the honors and get in some real practice. Together they started and put out fires in that house several times while we watched with the best view of anybody, until finally letting it finish burning while they protected the surroundings. A new residential development sits there now.

Since I had to wait, I started googling, hunting for information. The news about the morning high school power outage from the first storm was there, along with photos. Everything else was still warnings of possible severe weather that afternoon, in other words, what had already happened. No joy there. I also found mentions of hail damage, with a dozen shots from one news station of photos viewers had sent in, all of hands holding huge ice balls. (Nobody gets creative these days.) It also was apparently morning storm news. While Steve emailed a fishing buddy also in the general area to see 1: if he'd even answer that evening, and 2: whether he was OK and knew more than we were finding out, it became bed time. It would all have to wait for morning.

By 5AM, Steve was already up and had a reply from his fishing buddy. The buddy was fine and sent two links to news casts now on You Tube of the afternoon damage. Everybody seemed to focus on a tourist attraction, a hugely oversized adirondack chair, nicely colored red for the cameras to focus on, one of several around the chain of lakes, set out in public spaces for tourist photo ops since about 5 people could sit in it, which had been blown across a local lake. One estimate was it had "sailed" over a hundred yards. The downed electric lines were shown again, and then I was looking at the backs of buildings I pass going to my friend's house. Did they go to the end of the lane and show some real damage? Of course not. Instead a neighbor was pointing to his empty wagon, explaining how he'd raked all the day until the storm and now the storm had taken it all away, leaving a clean bare wagon. Like that was a hardship! The also referred to the buildings as sheds. They're garages, idiots! Sure, small, one car detached ones, but nonetheless, garages.

Since my friend should be up by now, I called to talk to her in person. She verified it had been an actual tornado, as several neighbors had reported seeing one (as well as several reports of sightings throughout the county.) People had been by to tarp over the open end of their house, the insurance company had been contacted, and they had enough in the savings account to cover a fairly high deductible. She filled me in on more details. The ramp still had a bent piece attached to the house, making ordinary use of the stairs under the platform impossible. She'd called the county and was waiting to see how long it would take them to replace it. Or what they would do since it was medical equipment they'd provided. Meanwhile she'd gone out the front door, one they never use, and only last year had trimmed back the brush that had grown around it. There is a steep drop from front door to street, difficult for all but the most agile, and the back door with the ramp connects the parking space to the living room, so the reversal of function was perfectly reasonable. Since nobody had used those front stairs, nobody knew they had rotted. So on top of everything else, she went through the wood. She's scraped, bruised, and is thinking about whether she needs to go get an x-ray to find out if she broke something in her leg. It's a comment on her medical issues that she can't tell if that happened. She'd broken a bone in one of her legs a couple years back and didn't find out until a month or so later. It took two years and three surgeries to get it healed, albeit crookedly.

Meanwhile their living room has to be blocked off from their dog, as the floor and furniture is covered in glass. The whole south wall and much of the east one were windows. Everything on that end of the house will have to be replaced. There is another room with couches and a TV so she has a place to relax. If she can. Medical caregivers come to her, and right now there's no easy way for that to happen. Her husband's taking a week off, and promises to remove the vestiges of the ramp first thing so the old stairs there (concrete if I recall) are useable, though their former railings were removed when the ramp was put in. She hopes, in absolute need for her to get out of the house, that she can navigate them somehow with a cane. I'm thinking one of her grown sons on either side as well. 

Once that call ended, I called the city clerk who had time for a nice chat. Shafer was pretty much missed, though she joked that a lot of the debris sitting out from some water system construction throughout town had conveniently been "cleaned up" by the storm. There likely will be branches down here and there, possibly trees as well, as that is happening more and more these days. She noted that when storms come through now, they tend to be more violent, high winds and a lot of rain in a short time. Welcome to climate change! So while somewhat reassured, I'm still waiting to hear from Paul.