Celia went to sleep around 7:45 and missed most of the storm. She didn't even wake up when a tree fell about 30 feet from her window; more on that later. We let Andres stay up until 8:45 so he could watch some of the Bruins game (he has become a Bruins fanatic somehow, a development for which I fully blame his daycare), and by the time we tried to get him down the storm was in full throttle. Constant lightning flashes, loud thunder strikes, and a whipping wind that kept sucking the blinds into the window before their eventual and short-lived release. Needless to say he did not want to go to sleep alone.
Natalia and I took turns staying with him, first in his bed and then, when that failed, in ours. But no luck--he was upset, and the sight of him all curled up in bed with his hands over his ears pulled at our heartstrings. We let him get up and watch more of the Bruins.
Eventually the thunder claps got softer and the lightning appeared less frequently as the storm moved east. The NBC broadcast of the hockey game went straight to local news during the first intermission, and we watched a live shot of the storm as it barreled into Boston--it looked like the Pru was directly hit by lightning. I pointed this out to Andres, which (naturally) prompted a lot of "why" and "how" and more "why" questions. I answered most of them poorly. No doubt that his future teachers will have a large mountain of naive conceptions about thunder and lightning to overcome.
He went to bed successfully soon after that, leaving me to watch the Bruins' woefully inept power-play all by myself. During the second intermission I took a quick walk down Turner Street to see if all houses and trees were still intact. All seemed well, so I returned home, watched the Bruins lose, and went to bed.
This morning I noticed that not everything was in the same place as it had been yesterday morning. Most notably: a tree seemed to have taken up residence in our back parking lot.
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| This photo was taken from my back porch. The tree is covering 3 parking spots. |
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| The view from inside the tree. |
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| Yes, there is a Jeep under all of this. |
The task was pretty simple--move a giant piece of wood. But since I'm not too strong and don't own/know how to use any power tools of distinction, this seemed like a Herculean operation. It was fortuitous that my next door neighbor was home...and even more fortuitous that he was willing to lend us his time and his electric saw. Some cut limbs here, some splinters there, a few four letter words thrown in for good measure, and we were able to roll the limb off of the cars. But that's about all we could do...cutting up the limb further was impossible given the tools at hand, so we were content to leave it on the ground. Where it remains tonight.
My best guess is that either the tree was hit by lightning (doubtful, as I think there would have been even more damage) or that the sustained wind gusts proved to be too powerful for this old resident of the neighborhood. In addition to the limb we cleared there was another, smaller branch that had splintered off the same tree; there was also another giant limb (from another tree as far as I could tell) that had fallen into our neighbor's yard. We were all quite lucky that all of this timber had fallen into relatively safe places, as certainly any of these could have done some structural damage to our house if the winds had persuaded them to fall that way.
So the cleanup will continue tomorrow, and probably into the weekend too. We've got a lot of uncut firewood if anybody wants it.
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Glad everyone is ok! I thought the storms we have been getting in the plains were bad, but that looks much worse.
ReplyDeleteNext time it's like that you should have Andes build a big fort and sleep in it.
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ReplyDeleteThat was an impressive storm: we were watching it through our front window like it was a movie, although we were pretty fortunate not to actually have to experience its wrath.
ReplyDeleteIronically, my father-in-law helped us chop down a large portion of an over-large tree in our back yard on Monday: if we'd waited we'd probably have had the job done more quickly, although we at least asked the neighbour to move her car for safety's sake.
Yeah it was nuts. The aftermath wasn't too bad, all things considered. I'm reminded of all the times that I have made fun of schools in DC or Baltimore for closing at the hint of a snow squall; well, I imagine many people in the midwest are looking at Massachusetts now and thinking "why are they so upset about these tiny storms?" Though pictures coming out of Monson and Springfield show that these twisters were no joke.
ReplyDeleteGareth--it's fortunate that you chopped the tree down before the storm. The high winds may have ended up doing the job for you, but you lose all control over where to throw the firewood!