Chasing away Chubby

This barn had the entire roof and the back side torn off.  As you can see in the picture it is already being repaired.

Hello This is a house that was destroyed.  The entire second floor, roof, side,  and back of the house is gone.  See the crane in the backround on the left?  It is repairing a roof on a house down the street.   Three homes were total losses in this area.  I lost count of how many barns were destroyed.

The pile of rubble used to be a Dairy barn.  Luckily…miraculously, the farmer didn’t lose a single animal.  These pictures were taken 2 weeks after the tornado and really don’t do the damage justice. 

Another barn flattened, but the little shack survived.

Ladies!  As you can see I am fine after the tornadoes.  However, here is a run down of what happened Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.

 I don’t think I mentioned in my Tuesday post that we all had been warned.  My weather guy- Bill, had been warning everyone that it was going to be a dangerous evening. I read his blog and he pleaded with us to be weather aware.  So I knew going in it was gonna be bad.  A squall line of storms was ripping across the southwest, heading towards us, and had been spinning off tornados all day.  He was especially somber in his predictions, so I knew it must be pretty bad.  however, you really don’t think it will hit you so close to home.

After writing my post on Tuesday night, I decided to take another step out into that gorgeous night, that breezy blackness that had brought me such pleasure earlier in the evening.  I stepped out the door and could feel the difference.  The starry sky was gone and in its place there was an inky blackness so thick you couldn’t see anything.  The air had changed too.  The pleasant feel of the evening was gone and in its place was an evil trepidation, a truly violent feeling was blowing in with the wind.  It was like Death was hanging in the air.   I don’t know if it was truly the feeling, or of it was some type of premonition, whatever it was it was creepy.  I came back inside and prepared to go to bed.  I knew I would be awakened later.

 At 11:30 my son’s cell phone rings.  I had slept through my own phone ringing twice,  I was so exhausted from staying up with DS10 all night the night before.  It was my sister telling me to get up and go to my Mother’s house the storms were coming.  She said to me  “It feels absolutely evil outside.”  Her remark mirrored my own feelings of what I had felt earlier.  So I got up and checked my “Weatherbug”- my desktop weather program.  The storms were still 2 hours away near Louisville, so I thought…I’m going back to bed for awhile.  However, before I could make it there Sister #4 was at my door to take us all over to Moms.  I was none to happy about the interruption either.  Storms or no storms I was wore out and was upset that I could not get another hour of sleep in.  So I got the kids together and we ventured over to Mom’s.  I was in an awful mood.  I was griping and bitching…sleep deprived Melody is not a happy Melody.  I tried to sleep on the couch but My weather guy- Bill was on the TV and between listening to his dire predicitons of doom and listening to DS10 cough, I could not sleep.  Finally about 12:30 they were approaching the next county over and the next county over got the worst warning of all…”Tornado warning!”  So we sat on the couch.  I expected us to get a Severe storm warning first, but before my eyes on the map I watched as my county turned red instead of yellow.   That means we too were now given a tornado warning.   I got up and started getting the kids up.  Mom has a cellar-not a basement- and I decided with DS10 having asthma attacks like he was, a moldy damp cellar was not the place for him.  So I ran out into that dark evil night, and ran to my box to retrieve my car.  The wind was really howling now, as I tried to call my Sister #3 who lives in town to warn her about the impending storm.  She wouldn’t answer so I left a message with the wind howling in the background warning her to get up and “Do what you need  to do.”  I then got into the car and drove and parked it in front of Mom’s ran inside and gathered up my 4 babies and headed to the car.  I hopped in the car Britney Spear’s style, with DS4 on my lap.  I drove the 500 foot up the road to Sister#2’s house and tried to get out.  The wind was blowing so hard I couldn’t get my door open more than a few inches.  DS10 was sitting directly behind me and he for some reason, could get his open wider than me, so I yelled for him to get out and run.  My sister ran out to help my DD.  Ds 16 came over about the time I got my door opened and helped me get everyone inside.   We got in and the kids went to the basement all except DS4 who was asleep and I laid him on the couch. The storm hit about then. I walked into the other room because BF called so I could hear and that was when the lights went out.  The kids in the basement screamed.  My neice yells out “A little help here please!”   Sister #4 grabs DS4 (who is awake now) and we head toward the basement.   In Sis#2’s brand new mansion (and with 6 chatty kids near) it was really hard to hear wht was going on outside.  At one point I venture upstairs in the dark and hear it go completely silent.  The rain stopped and it was completely quiet.  I was on the phone with BF who was freaking out, because he did not leave his box, and he said “It’s quiet!  That is not good!”  Then the storm proceeded it howling, torrential, assault. 

A little while later we got the “all clear” that the worst was over so I headed home to  a dark house.  I dropped off DS16 and DS10 off at Mom’s.  It’s 2:30 in the morning at this time.  I take DD6 and Ds4 home with me and climbed into bed.  BF called and that was the first I heard about the storm damage.  Two semi trucks had been turned over in Wal-Mart parking lot.  I went to sleep wondering if someone just made the story up.  The only damage we had was Sis#2’s patio table was thrown across her yard and shattered.   I didn’t sleep well because there were more storms afterward, and there was alot of lightning.  At one point it struck so close that the thunder and the lightning occurred at the same time and it shook my aluminum, rectangular box.  I called mom and asked if there were more storms coming.  Her reply was “How would I know, I don’t have any electricity either!”  (I really need to get a radio with batteries!)

I got to see the storm damage first hand as I drove to work the next morning.  A wall in the post office was blown out, light poles were snapped in half or were leaning precariously, marquis boards were destroyed- their metal frames twisted.  I tried to stop at the last gas station on the way out of town but the cover to the gas pumps were missing.  you could see the “guts” inside the gas pumps.  A storage building was completely gone.   The McDonalds sign while still standing had holes all through it like small pieces of debris had been thrown through it.  As bad as that was, I had not seen anything yet.  I just figured all that was wind damage. 

I used to live on the other side of the ocunty when I lived with BF, not far from the Wal-Mart and McDonald’s.  By the time I left work I had heard about the damage out that way so BF and I took a ride to see.  We were not prepared for what we saw.  I lost count of how many barns I saw completely destroyed.  Debris everywhere. Two homes completely destroyed and many more without roofs.  Trees uprooted everywhere.  I looked at the debris field and told BF…this was no straight line wind this was a tornado!  Wind would blow debris in a straight line.  The debris from a barn would be scattered all around for thousands of yards in all directions.  However I knew as soon as I saw the pine trees.  In one yard there was a bunch of old, majestic, pine trees.  They were not uprooted or snapped in half  like the others.  They were twisted.  I mean literally twisted.  The looked like they had exploded from the inside out.  I knew then that no matter what the NWS (they get to make the call on these sorts of things) decided, this was a tornado. 

In the local paper there was a story of a policeman who was on the hilltop (the highest point in the town) by the High school and could hear it coming and then he was enveloped by a brown cloud.  When he came out of it, his cruiser was facing in the opposite direction.  My Sister #3 lives not 1000 feet from that occurance.  She said that something hitting her window woke her up.  She was getting up out of bed when the town’s warning siren went off.  Her and her Hubby turned on the TV and saw that the county was red.  They made it to the basement right as it hit.  She said it sounded like a bunch of freight trains.  She said it was nothing she had ever heard. She said her husband was even scared.  She said her house began shaking and her and her hubby hugged a support beam.  She said she knew that any minute her house was gonna be ripped apart around her.  Luckily, it was not.  I am happy to say that they came away unscathed.  There house wasn’t  seriously damaged.

The couple who lived in one of the houses that was destroyed didn’t make it to the basement.  They said they were running to the basement and their furniture and their roof were following them.  So they fell onto the floor and held onto each other.  Thankfully they were unharmed.  If you could see there house you would believe in miracles.

Today the National Weather Service (NWS) came to view the damage and decided that it was indeed a weak F3 tornado. The grand toatal so far from around Ky is 17 confirmed tornadoes. There may be more confirmed however.  This was the most deadly February tornado outbreak ever, killing 55 people in the south.  No one on my county was injured.  However, in Ky there were 7 people killed. 

So I missed seeing a tornado…and that’s perfectly alright with me. 

 Love you all and hope everyone is safe…especially you Baileysmomma!  I am concerned for you since you live in So. KY.  I hope you came through the storms all right! 

 (((HUGS)))

Posted on February 7th, 2008 by lodyangel
Filed under: General, off topic