A Really Bad Storm
- June 04, 2004
- 2 comments
We had a really bad storm blow in yesterday that knocked power out until a few hours ago.
I was in the nearby town of De Queen, at a friend’s house (Mark), when it hit. I had heard thunder, and pointed it out to Mark. We looked on the Internet and saw a massive wall of red and yellow headed directly for us at weather.com. So I decided I was going to try to race the storm home.
It was deathly still before the storm hit, and muggy as hell too. We watched the clouds blowing in over the tree tops. They were moving amazingly fast and had a lot of green in them, which isn’t a good sign. You could also feel the temperature dropping fast. So I got in my car and started driving home.
I ended up getting caught at a stoplight about a quarter mile down the road. While I was waiting there, I could see the wind coming down the main street in the town. When it hit, it shook the car so hard it felt like someone had pushed the car as hard as they could. I saw the nearby Burger King sign lean back and then all the power went out in the city. I crept through the traffic light and tried to keep going home. There was all kinds of crap flying around in the air and on the ground. My car almost got hit by a large trash can bouncing about as high as my car. It was then I decided I should head back to Mark’s.
As I was driving back, trying to avoid more crap flying around, I saw that traffic had backed way up on the highway heading north. I found out later a large oak tree had fallen over the power lines and they were lying in the middle of the road.
Back on Mark’s street, I saw a tree had fallen right where I had driven just a couple minutes before. It had to have fallen within a minute after I drove by. That kind of freaked me out. I wound my way back to Mark’s and ran inside to weather the storm.
After half an hour or so, the worst of the storm had passed. I headed for home, careful to avoid the junk all over the highway. A few miles down the road, two huge pine trees had blown over and were hanging over both lanes of the highway. The only thing keeping them up was the power lines. Along the way home, I counted 12 trees down on and/or recently cleared out of the highway, all within 15 miles. There were a lot of trees down in the fields too.
When I got home, power was out, some branches had broken off and the light on our car port was blown off, shattering glass all over my parents’ car. Luckily, I had called home before the storm hit them, and warned them it was coming. They had time to unplug all the computers and stuff before it hit.
So, we didn’t have power until a couple hours ago. We have a 300+ foot well we use for water, but it uses an electrical pump to get the water. So we had to get out our generator to run the pump and the fridges. It’s amazing how much you take electricity for granted until you lose it.
Anyway, I hope that doesn’t happen again any time soon. That wasn’t the worst storm we’ve had here, but it was a bad one. A few years ago, we had a really nasty ice storm blow through which did a whole lot more damage. We were without power after that one for 13 days.
6/5: Here’s a link to an article about the storm on a site I did for the local paper last year. Note that my mother is quoted in the article.
This isn’t a comment about the story. Your sites alright, these few comments I’ve made are the 1st in 5 or so years that I have been bothered to make. I can’t msn chat, I’d rather watch “reality” TV, & thats saying something.
Cheers.