by Cathy
Last Saturday afternoon, we got hit with a "storm" or a "microburst" as some of my neighbors put it, that lasted about eight seconds. The damage it did? Well, four days later, it's still being cleaned up.
It began with the sky darkening, you know that ominous darkness that Mother Nature shrouds us with when something big is looming? So I braced myself for some serious downpour, but instead, as we lay relaxing in our living room, everything outside shifted. Literally, a burst of what seemed like all four winds hit at once and swayed the trees much further than by nature, they are meant to sway. This wind was LOUD. Then, we heard a series of thumps, cracks and thuds. And for the finale...with a faint click, all the lights went out. Then silence. Just like that, it was over. Eight seconds was all this took. Drizzle was now starting to set in.
"WHOA!" screamed my kids, their faces now plastered to our living room windows. Bella was busily Instagraming pictures of a large tree branch that was now splayed all over our front lawn.
"Yeah, that was craaaaaazy!" I marveled looking out onto the street. The only thing I saw was that branch and thanked God that no other parts of that tree had landed in our living room. Even Joe was snorted awake out of his afternoon nap to assess the damage. Luckily, it wasn't that bad. Or so we thought.
"Mom! How am I going to go the birthday party in this rain!" said Bella, looking out at the now flood-type rain coming down.
"Honey, we'll just have to wait it out," I said, busily searching for candles and a flashlight.
Ari started running around like a chicken with her head cut off, half out of excitement to light candles and hold the flashlight and half out of fear that we had no lights.
When the rain stopped, Joe was ready to drive Bella to the birthday party and Ari wanted to go along for the ride. I waved goodbye as they shuffled through puddles on our deck as they headed downstairs towards the garage. A few minutes later, I heard voices out back. I looked out and saw Joe and the girls huddled under an umbrella in the alley talking to some neighbors who were walking their dog. Then more neighbors joined in and there was a lot of pointing and gawking being done.
"What the....?"
I slipped on my flip-flops and headed downstairs to join them. On the way through the garage, I had to step over a giant outdoor rug that had flown from someone's deck onto our lawn and lay crumpled like a sad, magic carpet at the entrance of our garage door.
"What's going on?"
"Mommy!" screamed the girls in unison. "Come and see this! You have to come and see this!"
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| My next-door neighbor's SUV buried under a mangle of live electric wires and a snapped tree from two doors down |
"Luckily he wasn't in it," said one of the dog-walking dudes.
"This is quite something," I managed to say. "Obviously, this is why our power went out?"
"Yeah," said dog-walking dude #2. "And it's just our area here. These guys on this side of the alley still have power. It's just our corner here," he pointed out.
"Have you seen the front damage?" piped up dog-walking dude #1.
"Front damage?!"
We walked around to the front of our street, being joined along the way by yet more neighbors in pairs, arm in arm, with their their dogs, kids, wagons, strollers, all emerging like ants out of the shelter of their anthill, ready to assess the damage.
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| There are two cars behind this one; the second car's windshield was smashed to smithereens |
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"A microburst," he corrected me.
"B-b-but that's like a mini tornado," I said.
"Can you believe it?" said the neighbor whose property withstood the most amount of damage. "The tops of the trees shifted and then snapped off, shot upwards and landed here," he said pointing to the massive limbs laying in the street, on cars and in his back yard. "I had never seen anything like it before."
Shit, me neither! Well, braid my pigtails and call me Dorothy; I had never been in a tornado before.
An hour later, there was a fire truck out front, coming to assess the danger those lives wires were posing out back. Turns out they were touching the wooden deck of the nearby building and since the transformer was popping sporadically, the threat of fire was a possibility. An hour after that, a police car came out back, parked in our alley, turned on the flashing blue lights and held vigil around the downed wires, preventing people from walking by around it and cars driving past it.
"How much longer until Com Ed arrives?" we asked Officer Bored disrupting his video gaming for the umpteenth time to get a handle on the timing.
"No ETA yet," he repeated himself.
"Are you going to hang out all night?" we asked him politely.
"Until ComEd gets here," he said.
"But people who have been calling in have said that they may not be out here for two or three DAYS," I informed him, rather concerned about the food in my fridge and meat in my freezer. (This is what Greeks worry about - food.)
"Well, let's hope not," he said with a chuckle.
Knowing that they would be hanging out and prioritizing our downed live wire situation made me feel a lot better that ComEd would be out here sooner rather than later. Sure enough, in the dead of the dark night with the blue strobe lights of the police car piercing our eyeballs in the blackness, I heard the droning engines of trucks followed by the BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP due to the reversing of said trucks. ComEd must be here!! I squealed as I jumped out of my half-ass sleep to check out back. More flashing lights, yellow this time, and men in coal miners hats and jumpsuits were scurrying about.
What time is it? I was thankful I had a manual wristwatch and in between flashes through the kitchen blinds, I tried to check the time with one eye half shut. 3:40a.m. I got back into bed, now thinking that should the lights come back on, this place will light up like a Christmas tree. Sure enough, around 5am I was awoken by a bright light, thinking it was morning. I found the lights lit full on in our living room and up and down our hallway, right outside my bedroom door. I got up to see Joe snoring through all the hooplah on the living room couch since Ari insisted on sleeping in the Big Bed with me and a lit flashlight.
"Pssst! Joe!" I loudly whispered in excitement.
He overdramatically, as usual, snorted awake, jumped to his feet and asked "What's wrong!?!?" all in 2.5 seconds. I should nickname him microburst.
"The lights are back on!"
"You woke me up to tell me that?!"
"Yes, you were totally out in a fully lit room! Boy, you must be tired," I said, half pissed that he had been sleeping like a rock all night while I was up monitoring candles, kids and ComEd.
"Ya think?!" he said as he settled back down to sleep.
I shut off the now imposing lights and headed off to bed. Tomorrow, we will all see things in a different light.
