It's been a crazy few days around here! We had some major thunderstorms come through on Monday night. We'd gotten the kids to bed around 7:30, saw the severe thunderstorm warnings and hurried outside to get all of the yard toys and furniture packed in close to the house so they didn't blow around too much. The way our house sits, most storms hit us across the back of the house. This front was moving very rapidly toward the front of the house. Chip and I stood on the lawn and watched it come in. We could hear the wind coming, even though the air around us was still. I came inside as Boo came down the stairs complaining she couldn't sleep. At that moment, the wind whipped up around the house and Chip ran in, barely able to open the door. He said he'd seen two fronts collide over our house and saw some rotation in the clouds and debris flying across the pond in the backyard. We sent Boo to the basement and got Bug and Ebabe out of bed.
We stayed in the basement watching weather reports trickle in on the TV. Shortly after we got to the basement, there was a tornado warning issued for Lemont, an area about 15 miles away. We figured that had been the rotation that Chip had seen. After being in the basement with wind, rain and severe lightning for about 1 hour, we finally figured it was clear enough to put the children back to bed. We peeked outside and were stunned to see that the patio furniture had not moved at all. At first glance it seemed that the storm had passed without doing any harm. We went to bed hearing reports on the news of evacuations at O'Hare International Airport and Wrigley Field but that there was no real damage reported in Chicago.
The next day, while driving Bug & Boo to swimming lessons, I noticed that in the neighborhood behind ours (not far from where Stacy Peterson lived) there were many trees down, shingles off roofs and fences blown down. A few kiosk signs and trampolines were completely mangled. It wasn't until Chip got home from work and noticed that we had lost some facia that I began to see the damage around our cul de sac. Our neighbors had a tree break in half, there were shingles missing and siding down. I still didn't think it was that bad until I turned on the local news and saw that the National Weather Service had deemed that there had been a tornado in Bolingbrook. When I looked online to see where it was, I realized that it had hit in our neighborhood about 2 blocks from our house! The damage there was significantly more than we had. There were roofs gone, a garage collapsed, 2 houses are unlivable. No one was injured however. Amazing. There were no tornado warnings, no watches even when the storm came through. We were very blessed to have gotten in and to the basement and to not have had any more damage than we did.
Post a Comment
Love to hear from you!