Stormy Night

It was a pretty stormy night on Tuesday evening and the end result of it wasn't pretty.

I was in bed when the storms started rolling in. I had gotten in bed early Tuesday night for a few reasons. The main reason I will not go into details cause I am sure a lot of you wouldn't want to know. The second reason was that "Rescue Me" was on that night.

Anyway, I was laying in bed and had the TV on the weather channels. At around 8:00 the National Weather Service had issued a Tornado Warning for our county because a funnel cloud had been spotted in one of our neighboring counties and they wanted to give us as much as advanced warning as possible and to just be safe.

Mom was on the phone with my cousin at the time the Tornado Warning had been issued. I told her that she needed to get off the phone because there was some potentially dangerous storms headed our way and that she needed to get me up and into my wheelchair. My bed is right next to a window so I was freaked out and wanted to be in my chair. There is nowhere in our house really that I can get away from windows but I can be back at least ten feet or more and not be right on top of them. For some reason, I just feel better and am not as scared of the storms if I am up in my chair.

Mom comes over and starts prepping me to get me up into my Hoyer lift (a piece of medical equipment that lifts and transfers me from my chair to my bed or vice versa). As soon as she was about to hook me up to the lift, the power went out! She had to grab a flashlight to give us some kind of light to see what we were doing. The power came back on and went out again. It kept doing this the entire time mom was getting me up. She finally got me up and I was good to go. The power went out once more and stayed out for good.

I sat in the living room with mom and we sat in the dark and listening to my scanner which, obviously, had to be run on battery power. We were listening to all the public safety (Fire, Police, and EMS) channels as well as the Ham radio/storm chasers, keeping updated with the storms, where they were, the damage they left behind, and whether or not there were any more storms behind those that had passed.

The wind with these storms were clocked at between 60-80 MPH, the rain was a torrential downpour, and the lighting was intense, vivid, and quite frequent. There was also hail involved with the storms.

After the storms had passed, there were tree limbs down everywhere in our neighborhood. We even had a medium sized branch on our back porch. It was a weeping willow limb from a house about, I'd have to say, 10 to 15 yards maybe. Judging by all the damage I had seen, it seemed to me that it might have been a very-low-on-the-F-scale tornado but the National Weather Service didn't have any confirmed tornado touchdowns in our county. The damage from these storms was some of the worst that I can ever remember our neighborhood having from a storm. Our power was out until 5:00 Wednesday morning. That is also the longest time that I can remember us not having power.

There was also a house fire down the road on the road that runs north and south from our house that was kind of storm related. The man that lived there didn't have power, like the rest of the people on our block and probably more, so he had lit a grill lighter and was looking around his house for some candles to burn for lighting. While he was conducting his search, he accidentally set a pile of clothing and even some of the clothing he was wearing on fire and the fire spread throughout his bedroom. The man suffered only minor injuries and will be OK.

Needless to say, it was a rather exciting and event-filled night. I am hoping that we don't have any more storms like those for the rest of the season at the very least.

'Till next time.

Jason