Last Night's Storm

  Today I'm feeling very blessed. First, I'm very thankful I didn't know how bad the storm was as it was happening last night. We knew we might have severe storms, including a chance of a tornado. We began watching Ryan Hall early in the evening and it seemed the worst of the weather was going to stay south of us in the area around and west of Bentonville, AR and north of us west and into Kansas City. We pretty much let our guard down. Ryan Hall was still on and about 11:00 p.m., he started mentioning Joplin. My phone started going off with alerts from the local weatherman - get to your safe room! The weather radio was going off. Then Vince said "I hear the tornado sirens!" I can't hear them at all from inside the house but Vince can. I know - they're not meant to be heard inside the house. Funny because Vince never hears me when I ask him to do things but he can hear the sirens and I can't!   <G>

I was saying we should go into the safe room, then the electricity went off. Vince said he was NOT going to the safe room. We were already in the basement. I took a battery operated lantern and went and took a shower. I figured I'd just go to bed but by the time I got out of the shower, our power was back on but it was on and off - on just long enough for the internet to reconnect, get the TV on . . then electricity was off again. That happened probably 8 times over the next hour so we went to bed. The storm appeared to be over by then and we did hear that tornado sirens are activated when winds are more than 80 (or was it 85?) mph so it wasn't a tornado in the area that caused them to go off. Now we know we can have sirens without an actual tornado but if winds are 80 or 85 mph, it's probably a good idea to get in the safe room anyway.

This morning I went out expecting to see fence panels missing, trees down, but nothing! I figured the storms weren't that bad and then I looked at Facebook and the news. Oh, my . . I think for half of Joplin, Carthage and the surrounding area - so many are without power and will be for days. Crews have come in from other places to help but lots of power poles have to be replaced; lots of trees on lines and lots of downed lines.

There are so many people in our area with electricity right now. When I walk outside, I hear quite a few generators running. 

We don't have any trees down. We don't have any huge limbs down. One neighbor has quite a few big limbs down and one landed on their fence.  One friend down the road lost four big trees.

The church near us didn't have services this morning because they had flooding; I heard some of the stores in the mall have water in them.

A tornado would have been worse but this was quite a storm and I'm so thankful we didn't have damages.