Windstorm

A house on College Avenue
I'd planned to walk to work on Friday, but a strong wind was blowing and bringing in dust from the fields in and around our valley, and I didn't feel like getting grit between my teeth. So I drove. As the morning went on, the wind strengthened more and more until it was a roaring windstorm. According to the website for our local paper (afternoon delivery; I don't think our paper deliverer even tried to get ours to us on Friday afternoon), the gusts in our town were up around 50 miles per hour; at the airport gusts were clocked at 78 mph before the wind knocked out power to the measuring instrument.

I had been in a committee in our windowless conference room when I saw an e-mail come in from my husband on my handheld device. The e-mail told parents at his school that they were closing down because of the storm had closed down several streets and things were pretty dangerous outside, though it was safe inside the school. The teachers would hold the students inside, the e-mail said, until whenever parents could get there safely.
Surprised, I went back to my office where I saw the mess going on outside. Our P.R. folk had just sent out an e-mail advising everyone of the severe weather warning and the need to be cautious. As our president was out of town, I e-mailed our employees, letting them know that the nearby elementary school was calling for parent pickup (many of our employees have children attending there), and suggesting they do whatever they needed to take care of themselves and their families.I was sure the electricity was out at our house, so I stayed at work in our new administration building, which was staying safe and warm. It was amazing, looking out my office window. Fire trucks were going by regularly on College Avenue. The wind was so thick with dirt that at one point I could barely make out the outlines of the dormitory across the street. An evergreen was down by the corner of that dorm. Few cars were out, which was probably a good idea. I was glad I hadn't parked under a tree.As parents arrived to pick up their students, my husband heard reports of the damage and passed them on to me. Streets were closed because of fallen trees and power lines. Word was that the main highway coming into town was closed because of semis that had been blown over. A lot of people were losing shingles from their roofs.

I called George, our director of security, to ask how things were on campus. He cheerfully told me that most buildings had power, including our crucial-to-keep-powered biology research labs, and that very little damage had occurred on campus thus far. "About a dozen trees down," he said, "and some shingles off the roof on Bowers Hall, and a tree fell on our fence next to the ball field, causing some damage. But that's all." He said he was busy helping someone cut some branches off a tree that had fallen next to a truck.At two o'clock I thought I'd better go check on my parents; I could only get a busy signal when I tried to call them. First I drove to our house and tried the garage door opener. No response, which meant the power was out. Driving to my parents' neighborhood I saw that the 3rd house from them had the entire siding pulled away, flapping in the wind. It was an awful sight, even for me who was not the homeowner.At my parents' home the garage door was up and they were gone. I walked through their house, which was dark and quiet because of the power outage, and wondered where they'd gone. Turns out they decided to go find someplace where there was power, which meant the Chinese restaurant for lunch, and then to look up an old friend at the nursing home. Check out my dad's fortune in the fortune cookie message from lunch.I'd heard that Walmart had closed, but it hadn't. After meeting my husband for a quick lunch at Subway where there was power (the line of people stretched all the way to the door even in the midafternoon), I dropped by Walmart. Good move. People in line were full of stories, and it was amusing to see the older lady in front of me, when she heard there was another ice freezer in the store, actually run across the store to get a couple of bags of ice before anyone else could clean them out.

In the mid-afternoon our power was restored at home, but my parents' wasn't. So we had them over for a quiet Friday evening where everyone fell asleep by the fire. I felt so guilty, looking down on the neighborhood below us and seeing no light at all. Driving through town to an appointment at the church, I found myself making my way down eerily dark streets. The only island of light was our university. (The newpaper website says this morning that 20,000 households lost power from the storm.) Husband went across the street to help our friend Alice get a fire started for the old lady she takes care of over there. He came back cheery and smelling of woodsmoke, and said they were quite toasty-warm over there now.
And so the storm raged, finally ending at about 10 p.m. as predicted. Saturday morning Husband and I went out for a long walk to survey the scene in our town. The pictures with this post are from our walk.

I learned some lessons, walking around town. First, don't plant evergreens near your house if you're in a place that could get strong winds. It was the evergreens that came down on houses and cars; apparently they don't have a strong root system. The other huge old trees dropped branches, but far fewer of those old trees fell. Second, the houses that lost shingles seemed to be the ones with older roofing. At our 6-year old house there wasn't a shingle of damage, for which we were grateful.So there you have it, the windstorm that opened 2008 for us. Word from the newspaper is that this was a byproduct of the storm that has hit California, but it didn't hit the big city 45 miles from us; it just hit our little valley--good and hard. Odd how nature works. Now we'll just hope there's no rain until people get a chance to fix or cover their roofs.