We faired pretty well through the recent storms despite being only 1 mile north of a f2 tornado, 5 miles north of a 1/2 wide f5 and about 10 miles south of about half a dozen other tornados. So many people lost everything they owned in a matter of seconds. One couple got sucked out of their home and thrown into a tree. When they turned around, their house was gone. All they have left is the clothes they were wearing at the time. The f5 took out entire neighborhoods and business districts and even blew up a gas station. Melinda was 1/4 mile north of the f5 while at work and they had to take shelter in the walk-in cooler at Walgreen’s. They were stuck in there for 30 minutes while an untold number of tornadoes passed just outside the store. There are easily hundreds of millions of dollars of damage in our area alone. That doesn’t count the dozens of people that were killed or injured. My heart goes out to them.
Not to trivialize the loss that so many suffered, but the worst thing that happened to us was that we lost power for 42 hours. In a matter of hours after the filters and air compressors stopped working, the tank turned toxic. We were changing the water as often as we could manage, but we were unprepared for the temperature drop of the water. My fish live comfortably at 79 degrees. Well by the 36th hour our tanks were down to 67 degrees. The cold temperature and toxic conditions was too much for one of our giant fish that we had had for 4 years. Our pride and joy, a female electric catfish parked herself in the warmest water she could find at the top of the tank and kept her head poked out of the tank for the entire 42 hours trying to breathe. We were so afraid we were going to lose her. Then we have a $80 fish that we were concerned about, but he never really showed any signs of real stress.
As for our house, we received very little in way of wind and damage. In fact, even with a tornado only a mile away, our trees were barely moving. The rain we got was actually a benefit to us since we had just over seeded our lawn and had no other way to water it.
Our biggest inconvenience is that we had to drive 35 miles to get to a grocery store that had perishables like milk, meat, and orange juice, and we were stuck at home for a couple days because we didn’t have enough gas to get to a gas station that had power at the pumps. When they finally did get power, there was a 2 hour wait just for a turn at the pump. By the end of that day those gas stations were dry.
We fared pretty well as our refrigerator and water heater are relatively new and have excellent insulation. We didn’t lose any of our perishable foods and after 36 hours of no electricity our water heater still had hot water in it. We used what we could get out of it to warm up the water in our fish tanks. For food, since we keep so much of it frozen, all we had to do was walk onto to the back porch and grill. So we ate pretty well. We also always have about 10 gallons of drinking water on hand so that wasn’t an issue as a lot of the communities right now have contaminated water in the taps. We limited our time in the fridge to only a couple of seconds at a time. If it was in the fridge or freezer and we didn’t absolutely have to have it, we left it where it was so as not to let out the cold air. There was no way for us to get ice since everyone around us was out of electricity and bought up all the ice in the first couple of hours. Once it was gone there was no way for the stores to get any more. It’s all being routed to the areas hit the hardest, and rightly so. It’s a good thing that we have such an efficient fridge because I have $24,000 worth of medication in the bottom of it. That would have been a mess. This sealed the deal on us forking out the dollars to get a generator. Life would have been a cakewalk if we had had a generator. We could have alternated between powering the fish tanks and powering the fridge and freezers. Don’t forget a couple of hours every night for recreation, but our necessities would have surely been met and we’d be one fish richer today.
We were actually sandwiched between two concentrations of tornadoes, so we are really blessed. I barely noticed the wind outside while all this was going on. My power went out fairly early on so I didn’t even see the news to hear what was going on around me. They cry wolf so often here that I don’t know I would have paid any attention to the news even if I had seen it. Any time the rain falls or the wind blows, everything shuts down and the local tv stations go to full-time weather broadcasts. I’ve heard our tornado warning sirens go off so many times when the wind isn’t even blowing. Like I said, crying wolf. Even so, the f5, with winds over 200 mph, was traveling across the ground at 55 mph so even for the people watching the news there was no warning before they were hit.
Check back in the next week or 2 and I’ll see if I can get some pictures of some of the damaged areas. Like I said, the devastation is astounding. It’s a wonder we didn’t lose more people that we did.
Well that’s all I got for now. Like I said, check back in a week or 2 and I’ll try to get some pictures posted. I really don’t see how any camera will be able to capture the scope of the disaster, but I’m willing to try.
To anyone reading this, if you were subject to the storm, I hope you made it out unscathed. My heart goes out to you if you lost anyone or anything. If you’re not in the area, take what you see on the news concerning the tornadoes and triple it. Then you’ll have an idea of what went on here in just a few short hours.
Take care all.
jasen
