Huge windstorm!

We had a huge windstorm yesterday with sustained winds of 50 mph and gusts of 80 mph! Of course, we lost our power due to many trees falling. We were without power from about 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Since we're on a well that means we can't get any water either. Thankfully we do have a generator, but I don't know how to hook it all up so I didn't have any power until my husband could come home from work at about 2:30, maybe. It was a pretty scary storm and I watched many things fall down all around us. There are still many people here in Walla Walla without power, including one of our neighbors, since our tree took out their power line!

We took a lot of pictures of course. There were so many trees down. It was amazing! Many streets were just completely blocked. Almost every one's house lost some shingles. Some lost their roofing all the way down to the plywood and now they are predicting rain and snow in the next few days! We went to Home Depot today to buy a chainsaw to cut our tree up that fell and pretty much bought one of the last gas powered chain saws! The roofing department was full of people, too.

Here's a picture of our blue spruce tree that fell down in the front yard.


I pretty much knew it was going to blow over. I was hoping I would see it fall, but I had to go into the kitchen for something and when I came back to look it had already fallen! It was amazing to see the ground flexing under the tree every time a strong gust of wind blew. I could tell it was most likely going to fall away from the house, but I was a little worried that it could hit the house. As you can see in the picture it fell toward the road, kind of, and is partially blocking the road.

Here's a picture of some of the wires it damaged.

We were actually planning on have this tree cut down, so it's not that big of a deal that it blew over(except losing power and all that of course!). The power company was starting their process of every two years pruning trees by power lines and they would have cut it down for us.

The first thing I noticed as soon as I came up the stairs yesterday morning(we sleep in the basement) was that our shed had blown over! Here it is.

As you can see its pretty rusty and old. We were planning on replacing it, anyway. This next picture you can see the kid's slide was thrown all around and our glass picnic table, too. We actually saw the wind pick up the slide like it was nothing and throw it around. I was afraid it was going to come into the window by the patio. Instead it hit the corner of the house and bounced off into pieces. It should all go back together, though. Mischievo was all worried about his slide when he saw that.

Here's our grill, blown off the patio like nothing.

And finally, part of our fence was blown over!

So, that's the damage we had at our house. We might have had a few roof shingles blown off, too, but nothing bad.
This morning we drove to Home Depot and also took a few pictures around town. Many people had way more damage than we did.

Here's a house with a tree blown over on it.

These next two photos are of the high school's roof. So many shingles were blown off!


Some trees blown over at a park.

Here's the Nissan dealer's sign.

A house with a lot of shingles missing. There were worse ones but I didn't get all my pictures uploaded.

This tree was blocking the whole road.

Here's a picture of the worst damage we saw and with an amazing story to go along with it. This tree pretty much took out the whole 2nd story of this house. The lady who lives in it was in her bedroom, which is right where the tree hit, and she felt like she should get out of her bedroom and go downstairs. As soon as she started down the stairs this tree fell in on her house. She would have been maimed or killed of she hadn't left her room.

Here's another house with a tree on it.

And yet another tree down.

There are many more pictures that I could have posted but I figured they would just be repetitious. These pictures give you an idea of the kind of damage that was done. Pretty amazing to see 100 year old trees completely uprooted by the wind.
Well, hopefully I will get around to doing a catch up post next week sometime. It's been a long time since I posted! We've just had cold after cold after cold!!! I've never had so many colds in my life. So, I'll have to post more on that later.