I spent Monday in bed with Luke, having a Blue's Clues Marathon before it expired on Netflix. I just had arm surgery on Friday, and Monday was the first day I was alone with Luke. Since I had been drugged up most of the weekend, I hadn't paid much attention to the weather. Howard called me around 1pm to ask if the kids were getting released early. Apparently, work was allowing people to leave early if their kids were getting released from school early. I knew our district policy, and it is to keep the children. I told him to leave work anyway and pick the children up early. This is primarily due to the fact that I am not currently able to drive. I knew if severe weather hit in the afternoon that I couldn't drive to the bus stop to pick them up. In my mind I was thinking heavy rain, hail, and lightening - not a tornado.
Once they all arrived home we hung out for about 30 minutes when we decided we should turn on the news. I'm so glad we did. Once we saw that a tornado was forming in our area we had the kids get their shoes on and we casually put together a laundry basked of medicine, various chargers/electronics, a few stuffed animals, my purse, and 4 irreplaceable family photos dating as early as 1920. We were really not concerned at all because we've gone down into our shelter numerous times.
Once the news said "SW 149th street" we knew we were in trouble. By the time we got in the shelter we watched news coverage on the laptop until we lost power.
Once things got really serious, we started praying and crying…and some more crying. We reminded the children that we were safe in our shelter and that even if our house was not okay, we would be. The noise was deafening and it felt like forever. I even remember the ground rumbling while we were down there. Once it quieted down, Howard opened the shelter and immediately saw our very damaged garage door. The children and I stayed put while Howard assessed the damage to the rest of the house. About 5 minutes later we came out of the shelter. Shell shocked and speechless pretty much describe how we felt. Our light pole was snapped in two, we have a 2x4 impaled in our roof, our mailbox (and mail inside it) are gone. One of our trees snapped off. Our master bedroom window is busted out and we have debris in our bedroom. The vinyl siding to our house is also damaged. We have holes in our roof. Our backyard fence it mostly gone. We acquired random debris in our yard - notably insulation, trampoline parts, rags, vogue magazine, etc. Our garage door had to be ripped off by two men so we could get our vehicles out.
Random things that did not blow away - my new wreath, patio furniture, and trash cans. Yet the wind snapped a street light in half? Weird! I've always heard about the random destruction of a tornado, but seeing it first hand is surreal.
We checked on our neighbors, turned off the gas in the homes on our street, and assessed the overall neighborhood damage. During this time we were unaware of the complete destruction across the field from our home. The smell of gas was strong. There was a break in a main line a few houses down.
Our neighborhood is badly damaged, but not like what's on the news. The most serious damage occurred on the north side of the streets SW 149th and 19th. We live on the south side of the 149th.
Update: I typed this up Monday night. Since then I've just been mentally exhausted to write any more. I'm posting this incomplete because I know a lot of you wanted to see photos. Obviously our home is not like what you have been seeing on the news (thank goodness). We are so very fortunate that we still have a home to return to in the next week or so. Yesterday I was looking at the tornado track mapped out. Even though it was classified as an EF-5, my home was hit by the outskirt of it. Our damage is comparable to somewhere in between an EF-0 or EF-1 tornado.
Our front yard
Street light across the street
Neighbor
Our roof
Neighbors a/c unit, our shed in the side yard
Master Bedroom
Back of my house
Garage door
View from my roof, facing south.
A view from my roof facing North East. The tan coloring behind the green trees is the rubble of SW 149th Street. The buildings would have been clearly visible a few days ago.
My next door neighbors to the north.
Irony. Calm Wind Drive is the street behind me. I live on the north end of Nightshade Dr if you want to google the map.
At the back of my neighborhood, where the really destructive part of the tornado hit.
New construction down from my house.
Links to our tornado shelter blog posts
http://htparkes.blogspot.com/2010/02/flat-safe-part-1.html
http://htparkes.blogspot.com/2010/02/flat-safe-part-ii.html
