The Great Windstorm Of 2011

I thought I would post several photos of the path of destruction that the storm brought to our neighborhood last week. I've heard reports that the wind was near 100 mph. I know that it was loud enough to wake us up at 2:00 in the morning and keep us up nearly all night long. And it was powerful enough to knock over trees and fences all over town. It was a persistent little cuss, too. It continued to blow until after Noon. Trees fell on power lines knocking out power to nearly the entire city. We didn't have power for a few days. We were lucky enough to have a gas fireplace insert to heat the house while the power was off. The cleanup effort started before the wind even blew itself out and it's still ongoing. Church on Sunday was cancelled so that the members could haul storm debris away before another wind storm came through on Sunday evening. Take a look at the aftermath.

This is our neighbor's backyard. And yep, those are our power lines.

This is the power pole that runs to our house.

Here we see that bad things happen when the power goes out—boredom sets in and things really get out of hand. This is how Abbie entertained herself while she waited for the power to come back on. Poor Christian was a good sport, but he doesn't look like he enjoyed this activity very much. And why would he...those shoes DO NOT match that outfit.

The power company worked around the clock to get the power turned on as quickly as possible. Our neighborhood is now the proud owner of two new power poles. Woohoo!

All of the photos included in this post were taken within just three blocks of our house. But, from what we've seen, the same sort of damage occurred everywhere throughout several cities and was even more severe in certain areas. We feel fortunate that with so much destruction, there weren't any deaths attributed to the storm.