TeamEkins: June 2010

View From Front Porch

Minnesota set a record for tornado touch downs on June 17th (39 total) and we got one of them around 9:30p. Many prayers of thanks as Jayne and the kids were not injured. I was on-call at the hospital. We knew about severe weather warnings and tornado watches and had talked about what to do if things got bad. Due to a computer glitch, the sirens did not go off. Jayne was upstairs and noticed the rain against the windows was more intense and when she stood up, all the windows bowed inward. It happened a 2nd time before she was downstairs checking on the kids who were asleep. Only when she came up the stairs again did she realize the magnitude of things, "Why is there a tree on my porch?"

We lost the 2 big maple trees in our front yard (twisted and broken at trunks) and 2 good-sized apple trees in the back (blown on their sides) and the third, largest (25ft) apple tree is leaning and will fall eventually. The soffit of our porch was badly damaged by the wind and you can see quite well up into our attic now. A few others homes in our immediate neighborhood had trees down but of the 30 homes on our bend of the road, we had more tree and house damage than all combined.

The National Weather Service says the tornado was class EF-1, was 150 ft wide and traveled 1.3 miles. Two died in tornadoes only an hour away. No one was seriously injured in Rochester but there were estimates of ~20 houses which were 'total losses' [orange x's and all] according to our next door neighbor who had a parent in that neighborhood and who was able to cross police barriers to get into check on their family member. A local hardware store lost a 10m section of its face and roof and a nearby church lost >10 big, mature trees.

A mob of kind neighbors helped us cut the tree blocking the garage at 11pm that night. I got to help after work, scrubs and all. The next morning, kind members of our church chipped in to help get a majority of the trees chain sawed, clipped and hauled to our local brush dump. By the end of the day, the front yard was limb free and we shed a little tear for an over-bleached sunset on a home without our maples. Then we reminded ourselves that some had died and some had lost homes. It was all quite a shock, on many levels.