September 15, 2008

Remnants Of Ike

Our neighbors' car.
The car is under this tree.

Maybe, I'm dull and boring, but things going on around me, last night, were far from it!

Around seven o'clock, the wind had picked up, quite a bit, and had begun blowing things around on the back deck. The glider blew across the floor, and was stopped by a storage compartment, so didn't hit the window. We went out, and moved everything else up against the privacy fence on the side of the deck.

About fifteen minutes later, we heard a lot of sirens, and my husband commented that they were being kept busy tonight.

At seven-thirty, he left to go to his store, and came back in, only a couple of minutes later, saying that he guessed he wasn't going anywhere for awhile.

It's pretty far back to our family room/kitchen area from the front of the house, but I don't know how we missed what was going on out front!

The wind had taken out part of a very large tree next door to us, and it fell across the power lines, and they were lying over the street, and right across our driveway. The street was filled with police cars and fire trucks, and people yelling for everyone to stay on their porches, to avoid coming in contact with live wires which were lying all around. They also had each end of the street barricaded to prevent traffic from coming through.

Our son was out, but we were able to get him on his cell to tell him what was going on. We were concerned because, as it got later, it was hard to tell whether the street was still barricaded, and we didn't want him driving into a potential disaster.

Being the clever guy that he is, though, he parked in one of the parking lots on a street behind us, and climbed over our back fence!

Many of the houses lost power, but we didn't, except for a few hours, when they started working on the lines around one o'clock this morning.

The car in the pictures belongs to our neighbor, and he is very thankful that he didn't lose his life, also. He had just started out to move his car, and stopped for a couple of minutes to talk to some other neighbors across the street, where other trees had been falling. If he hadn't done that, he would have been in the car.

The remnants of Ike wreaked havoc all over NE Ohio, last night, with many injured, and at least one twelve year old died when a tree fell on him.

The sound of the wind was so loud, that you could hardly hear yourself speak. It lasted for at least an hour, intermittently, and it was frightening. News reports are that the winds were over seventy miles per hour.

One can only imagine the horror of a hurricane at full force.


View of the workers, this morning, cutting the tree away from the car.



Another view from my upstairs window of the smashed car.

Click on pictures for enhanced view.

17 comments:

Granny J said...

Ohio? Here in Arizona we periodically get remnants of Pacific Coast hurricanes that come up the Gulf of Calif., but I never realized that the fallout from Gulf of Mexico storms held together sufficiently to rage into Ohio.

Jan said...

granny j..yep, that's what they're talking about around here!

When they mentioned it, I thought it sounded crazy, too, but they are saying that Ike was different, and I agree.

Here's an excerpt from AP article:

The remnants of Ike dumped as much as 6 to 8 inches of rain in parts of Indiana, Illinois and Missouri, spawned a tornado Arkansas that damaged several buildings, and delivered hurricane-force winds to Ohio, forcing Cincinnati's main airport to temporarily shut down. Flooding in Missouri closed the street in front of St. Louis' famed Gateway Arch.

Power outages darkened more than a million homes and businesses in Ohio and Kentucky.

More than 680,000 Duke Energy customers were without power Sunday night in southwest Ohio and northern Kentucky in the biggest outage in the company's history, said Duke Energy spokeswoman Kathy Meinke.

"It's going to be quite extensive," Meinke said. "Over 90 percent of our customers are without service."

I think there have been at least 15 deaths in the Midwest attributed to Ike.

k said...

It's really amazing how much destruction he continued to cause for so very long a path.

I'm in SW Missouri right now, and the storm's center was originally predicted to pass right over us. Then it moved east somewhat, so we were spared the brunt.

Still, we had a wild night of wind and rain. It knocked out the hotel's internet for 1 1/2 days. argh!!!

I'm guessing that you didn't take any damage yourself. If true, I'm so glad! And way good for your neighbor to have escaped disaster in that car. What pix!

Jan said...

k..it really was wild, wasn't it?

Thankfully, we didn't get any damage at all, and although many homes lost power for several hours, we didn't at all until they started repairing things, early morning.

The only damage that I know of, was to the neighbor's car..it was his tree!

Oh..and to the power lines--two poles were almost pulled down!

k said...

It gets sort of lonesome, or something, when your neighborhood loses so many trees. It always catches me off guard, how unsettling it is after they clean it all up and you realize how much more barren everything looks.

And that sound it makes? It's eerie, isn't it?

Some people say the sound of a tornado or a hurricane is like a freight train. That's sort of right...but still, I find the sound of a train rather soothing.

The sound windstorms make, they just sound like what they are, to me anyway.

That hurricane howl!

One of the few times in my life I felt real, genuine, intense fear was when Wilma broke my home office window, not five minutes after the trees fell on the house. The hurricane came inside my room and the howl was no longer on the other side of the window.

It was in the house. The hurricane came in the house.

k said...

Seeing things like electric poles pulled down, or almost down, sort of warps your sense of balance. Like the normal course of life goes off kilter, and you wonder how safe it all really is.

Those telephone and electric poles represent stability and order. Once they're injured, you start to think of all the other infrastructure of society, to wonder how stable it all really is.

Jan said...

k..it does give one an eerie feeling, and also shows us just how much we are NOT in control of things!

I was in a tornado once, and I will never forget that...again, everything around me was devastated, but there was one leaf from a giant, uprooted, oak tree touching the window, and there in the branches was a bird's nest, intact!

k said...

HA! Yes, indeed. Here we go thinking we have it all going so smoothly, and then...POW!

I love those miracles, the things left untouched in the middle of all that destruction.

Anonymous said...

I don't know where you got the idea you are boring, because you are not!
Certainly your life isn't boring I can tell from the pictures. Looks like a nice neighborhood, too. I'm glad nothing happened to your place, or to you and your family.

Jan said...

Hermit..awwww, thanks!

I'm thankful that things turned out as well as they did, but I feel sorry for the guy next door.

rockync said...

Not much to be done when Mother Nature lets loose! Don't feel too bad about not hearing all the hoopla; I once slept through a three alarm house fire on the next block. Emergency vehicles screamed past the house as the other place burned to the ground and I never heard a thing! I'm surprised your power didn't go out with all the lines down. I'm glad your neighbor stopped to chat - isn't it amazing how God sometimes intervenes. I've had a few of those times when had I been somewhere just 5 mins sooner, etc The undeerlying message seems to be, "It's not your time yet, but remember, it could have been your time. Are you ready?"
I am relieved to see that there has been so little in the way of fatalities, which doesn't make it any easier for the families who did lose someone, especially families who lose a child - I hate hearing that. Glad to hear you and yours are still in one piece!

GUYK said...

Mother Nature does this once in a while just in case we get too complacent and forget what a bitch she can be.

Ya know, I have never really worried about earth being taken by aliens from outer space. What creature would want a place with 200 MPG winds, floods, deserts, earth quakes, volcanoes, thousands of varieties of biting insects, man eating reptiles, poisonous snakes, and democrats ???

Jan said...

guyk..you have a point, there! LOL

Desert Cat said...

Wow. That *is* unusual for a tropical storm to sustain itself so far inland.

I'm actually kind of surprised they dissipate so rapidly once they get inland. I figured, low pressure system is low pressure system, right? But the ones that form in the temperate zone have different causes than tropical storms. Ike must have gotten lucky and hitched itself to a jet stream loop that kept it going.

Jan said...

DC..I don't know what happened, but it sure was something else!

According to reports, there were only three or four counties, out of 88 in Ohio, that didn't sustain some damage from Ike, and there were several deaths, and many injuries throughout the entire state.

Gypsy Butterfly said...

Hello Jan,
WOW!!!!! How scary that storm must have been.
Your pics show some terrible damage.
I'm glad you and your family are o.k..
Wishing you a nice evening,
Lydia

Jan said...

Lydia..hi, there!

Actually, I missed the part where the car got crushed, but the rest of the storm was pretty scary because of the wind..couldn't hear yourself think, it was so loud!

I am having a nice evening, thank you, Lydia...I hope that yours is the same! :)