The Storm

 This is the morning after. On Sunday morning around 7 AM, and since we had no electrical power, we went down to the local QT to get some coffee. This is what we saw. The main street was closed off due to downed power lines. I thought, not too bad, this shouldn't take long. Hmmmmmmm.

Saturday night 9/18/2010 around 10:30 we had had some rain and thunder, lightening and stuff like that, we thought it was winding down, well, guess again. As I was all tucked in to sleep, it sounded like the beginning of a war outside. All hail broke loose, I actually thought that the window next to my bed was going to break from the way the hail and rain was beating on it.

 At 11AM Sunday this is the remnants of the hail from the night before. Eleven hours later the hail is still covering the ground. I have never seen this, especially when it is above 75 degrees. The fog and haze gave our surroundings a very eery feeling.
During the storm the rain and wind were so strong. Trees were uprooted all around us, branches and limbs were broken and brought down. Back out on the main street, two power poles were broken off about three feet from the ground and lay across the street impeding traffic and cutting off power. There were lots of problems after this storm, it was going to take some time to clean up.

The hail laying in a parking lot looked like we had an ice storm. I guess we did. This ice lasted until mid afternoon, when the temperatures reached close to 90.



This is more of the hail remaining on the area surrounding our house.



These are lines down about two houses from us. There is also a large tree limb blocking this intersection, the wires are tangled in the limb. We think the branch came out of the tree in our front yard, and was washed down the street by the water that ran from curb to curb about 8 - 10" deep during all the rain and wind.

 You can see the gunk and the junk the storm left behind. These are tiny pieces of shredded leaves. I guess the hail tore up the leaves, stripped them from the trees and plastered them all over the houses and cars.
There were trees blown down, uprooted right out of the ground. Broken limbs, trees on houses, cars. After living in stormy places like Florida and Texas, I never saw anything like this before.

We, personally, did not have any significant damage that we know of, yet. We need to have the roof checked, a small section of fence fell down, that's fixed now. One of those turbine thingys flew off the roof, that's back on now. And a small shed blew over, that also is upright again.
We did not get our electricity back on until 8:30 Monday night. It was a long couple of days without power. I did not do well, I don't like that feeling of sitting around waiting for something to happen.

I must give high fives and extreme thanks to KCP&L our power company. They were out in force for several days. They still are out, fixing stuff. Kansas City, MO was out with clean up crews, picking up trees and debris from yards and streets right away.

There is still a lot of junk to pick up, but our street is back to normal. The kids even went to school on Monday as usual.

The story we heard was that it was not a tornado but three,(or more) micro bursts packing 80 mile per hour winds, hail, lightening and all the rest. It was something. And there were no major injuries during all of this.
 

The view from my front porch.