As described on the
main page, a tornado came through about 11:30pm on April 12, doing major damage to the area, including destruction of power and communication lines, which in my neighborhood are still hung up on poles instead of being buried as is the common practice now. As many of you know, the website server runs out of a closet in my home office, and the massive destruction in the area led to the significant delay in restoration. Power came back early AM on April 19, and I was soon able to verify the server had no damage. (Which I expected since I was able to safely shutdown after power outage thanks to the APC battery backups I demand for all my major equipment.) However, fiber optics lines were not reactivated until this morning, and may still be subject to some minor outages for the next day or two. But, the server and website are back and operating normally again.
Tornado was rated EF3 with maximum winds of 145mph (that's about 233kph). Those of us living on the north side of the neighborhood suffered relatively minor damage, mostly trees downed but those in the south half were directly in the path and suffered major damage, some of which will cause total loss of their homes.
Here are some photos I took Monday morning. The first two are my house, showing the 40 foot cedar and power pole collapsed in my front yard and tangled up in the power and communication lines, and a 70-80 foot oak in the back that was uprooted and fell across the fence into my neighbor's yard. Lucky the cedar fell away from the house and not into it - the bay window there is my office so if it had fallen into the house I could still be without power or fiber optics. Next seven are houses and vehicles in neighborhood that suffered the most devastating damage. These are all about quarter to half mile away (around a half to one kilometer). The next two show buildings across the entrance to my neighborhood: a gutted nursing home and collapsed church. The last two show trees in power lines, to show the monumental task required to get power and internet services restored. I'd say in the half mile to entrance of neighborhood there were 15-20 breaks in the lines, 15 trees tangled up in wires and 3 broken poles (including mine) - and that's just two and a half streets worth of the dozens in the area impacted. Other than the two large trees downed (the cedar actually crushed a third, smaller tree under it) the limit of my damage was one small piece of siding that fell out above the bay window (I recovered it Monday morning) and some shingles ripped away from the apex vent of the roof (but no leaks)
