One minute I was looking out our sliding glass door toward the golf course behind us and the next minute I was screaming for Denny to help me hold the door in its frame as the wind and hail were pounding to get in. He looked out and said, "Oh my God, there's a golfer out there." I looked out and saw a figure flat on the ground next to a stocky pine tree attempting to shield himself from the nickel-size hail and pummeling winds. I said I was going to go get him and as I took off my glasses and set my cell phone on the counter, Katie pushed by me and said, "No, you're not. Grab me that blanket off the couch" and out the door she went. Denny and I spend several worrisome minutes because we could see NOTHING more than five feet across the deck, when Katie and the golfer, Steve, came up on the deck and through the slider. Both were sopping wet and dripping blood from small cuts made by the hail. Nothing life threatening but minutes later as the storm lost some of its fury we could see that it could have been.
Katie has reddened hail welts in several places
Here's the tree Steve had been huddled under.
He was on the ground on the right side curled up to the trunk and would have been crushed as it was uprooted and toppled over in the wind if Kate hadn't gotten him out of there.
Apparently The Man Upstairs must have been pleased with Katie's heroics because when we looked out the front door, there was her car in the driveway with a tree limb about 14" in diameter across the roof of her car.
Amazingly, there are only a few dents in the roof, but the glass in the sunroof was undamaged. We think the limb kind of sagged onto her car instead of literally dropping on it and really causing a mess.
The little town of Valley had some hard hit areas too. Mostly big old trees that couldn't stand up to the force of the wind coupled with the rain-softened soil that caused them to uproot. A grain silo in town must have taken a direct hit, crushing the silo and knocking the boom into the power lines.
Anyway, we finally got power back at 2:04 this afternoon after spending most of the day listening to the music of chainsaws.
2 comments:
Yikes!!!! That is one brave kid you have. Bravo to Katie!!!
{{My Princess probably would have hightailed it to the basement ASAP!}}
Oh yeah, we had a 70-something widowed neighbor, two mid-20's Moms and their infant and toddler in our basement, too. It all happened so fast. Literally, one minute it was gorgeous blue sky with light fluffy clouds and 10 seconds later it was black as night with howling wind and hail.
And how incredibly STUPID was I to try to hold the sliding door in its frame? And holler at my husband to help?
The scariest part was watching a heavy wrought iron chair get tossed across the deck AFTER Kate ran out and disappeared into the hail. I'll tell you my heart about stopped as I realized NO ONE should have been out in that. Thankfully it all ended well with minor injuries. I shudder to think that Steve would have been crushed by the tree and there was no way we could have gotten help in time to save him.
The vinyl siding on the west side of our house looks like a Gatling gun was taken to it, along with the soffit and facing having been torn loose. Our huge hostas are stripped to twigs, but they survive Nebraska winters so they will come back. This has been the nuttiest year for weather around here!
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