Tornado

We had quite an interesting afternoon yesterday when a tornado hit our street. It had been raining and cool all day and there were no sirens until about 40 minutes after the tornado passed - apparently it took everyone by surprise.

Helen was asleep upstairs and two guys had just finished working on our kitchen. The power went out, but it just seemed like an ordinary storm, so they packed up their things and left. A minute later, they came running back into the house hollering, "there's a tornado!" so I ran/flew up the stairs to grab my sleeping Helen and we all headed to the basement. They said they went out to their truck and looked up to see giant tree branches swirling 50 feet in the air and coming toward us. Our neighbor looked out his window when he heard the wind and saw the swirling debris and tree limbs come to our corner, take a left and head up the next block. Can you believe our luck?
The streets south and west of us were pretty devastated, but luckily it seems that no one was hurt.
Mobile Command set up on our corner, so after Helen finally woke up (she stayed sleeping in my arms in the basement for a while), we went out to observe. Actually, we waited quite a while to be certain things had calmed down:
She loved the excitement of the lights, sirens and diggers.
This uprooted tree (below) was the only significant visible damage on our street, so we went out later in the evening to inspect. The only inconvenience for us was that our power was out until around 10pm. Helen kept wanting us to turn on the lights, but we told her the power lines fell down. That's when she said, with her huge eyes as wide as they could be, "trees fall down! on somebody's house! crash!" and we realized that she had taken in a lot. We talked about it for a while and assured her that all the people are fine. This morning she told the story again and added, "people OK."

It's really unfortunate for all our neighbors who are dealing with some serious clean-up and reconstruction issues. Thankfully, city workers and the power company jumped right in to get things running rather quickly. Today was an odd day at home because the street is still blocked off, so instead of the usual sound of traffic zooming by, all we heard were chainsaws and the "beep...beep...beep" of big trucks backing in to do their work.