We had severe thunderstorm warnings for my area last Sunday. I had been getting the alerts on my weather app for the whole day. We felt the wind pick up and my phone started to buzz with warning about wind and lightening. I ran around the house closing windows and was closing the window on the street side of our kitchen when I saw the wind start to change.

The wind started to rip branches off the tree in front of our house and they started to swirl upward. I quickly closed the window and told my wife we needed to get into the basement. We were headed down when we heard a loud bang.

After the bang the noise of the wind changed and when I looked out it was pouring rain straight down and the wind had all but stopped. And the tree in front of our house was on the sidewalk.

Several things happened all at once- a window shade snapped up, four sections of the neighbor’s fence exploded outward, the other neighbor’s porch was pulled away from their house, a metal barrel was blown into our old car, and the tree fell. All this when tornado force winds howled. It was a cacophony of destruction.

We were lucky. The tree fell away from the car. It missed the power, cable, and phone lines to the house and it didn’t touch the street lines either. Our roof is fine, as is our chimney. Our porch is still attached to the house.

The wind pulled some of the aluminum capping away from the trim. I think a section of fence his the new car because there is a small dent on the rear driver’s side door. There was a scuff that wiped off on the passenger’s side door from a trash barrel that blew up my driveway.

​On one side of us, one neighbor lost 4 sections of fence. On the other side their roof is trash, their 2nd floor porch ripped away from their house and has to be rebuilt, and one person lost their car though many more were dented and damaged. One house was damaged by a tree falling into it.

There’s a section of my regular bike route where trees are broken in half and others are just gone.

That said the morning after the city had removed the tree and by the time I returned from work they had cleaned up and patched the sidewalk.

A few days later whatever is left of the Weather Service confirmed that we’d had a microburst event

​The story in 3 images:

I have an art post but have been preoccupied with this and a few other things, mostly the DayJob.