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.