Monday, August 15, 2011

We lost power for about 44 hours, but I'm Baaack!

Wow! What a storm. Again!  It's starting to get a little annoying losing power and losing all your refrigerated food.  A big wind came through Saturday afternoon and knocked down many trees in the Louisville area and knocked out power for many households all over Louisville.  I took pictures and will add them at the bottom. 
When the storm hit it knocked down a tree behind our neighbors house and it fell into their house crashing through the roof.  Shane and Ollie have 3 girls and they had her brother and his wife visiting along with their 4 kids.  Their's was the van you'll see in the pictures.  A total loss.  They had been out of that van only about 10 minutes when the storm hit.  Had they still been in the van, I'm sure both adults and at least one or two of the children would have been killed.
But, the tree crashed through the roof of their house and they came running out in the storm to the house next door. Mary Lynn and I saw them run out and I started across the street to get them to come to our house.  It was raining and storming so hard they couldn't hear me and headed for the next house after nobody answered at the first house.  Then they saw me and followed me across the street to our house and shelter.  The kids were all screaming and crying, every one soaking wet, and two of the girls were complaining about being hit by the roof as it fell in.
We managed to get the children calmed down, with stuffed animals we have on hand, and checked the two girls and found out they were fine. We got out all the toys we had and let the children play.  They ranged in age from 9 years to 5 weeks.  So, we had sudden house guests for about 3 hours Saturday evening when we also had no electricity.   It was quiet the experience. Luckily, nobody was hurt, just property damage.
But, here are some of the pictures.



The van was a total loss as, I believe, was the little red car. The red car was crushed on the front end and the wheels splayed out.  The black pick-up truck had some dents in the roof and the rear window shattered.  This is the branch that took down all the electric wires.







This was the tree that went through the roof and had the family evacuate.  The little girls were all playing upstairs.  When the tree fell, the girls started screaming and the baby started crying.  The mother, Ollie, said she didn't know which direction to go first, the girls or the baby!









Doesn't Mary Lynn look natural with this little 5 week old storm refugee?











This was a large tree that fell in Tyler Park












This was the large tree that fell across Windsor Avenue at Bardstown Road. There's a car under this tree on the right of the street.












This is the car that was
UNDER that tree on Windsor Avenue.














When we cut the big tree branch that was across the van and stretched across Goddard Avenue, we cut it back to the van.  This was the log left on top the van.  You'll notice the tree told us what time the storm hit.  5:43 p.m.!









Finally, the hero's of my story arrived on the scene. After working about 2 hours power  was restored on our block.






2 comments:

Mary Lynn's Blog said...

No power wasn't bad at all because the weather was really mild. Lot's of power outages over the past few years, though. Hmmmm. What's goin' on?

Kevin said...

You were news station stars. I saw the Tabler mansion on Wave.com, Wlky.com,and Courier-journal.com. It's a good thing Tracey was there to clean up all the storm damage.