The storm of 06

So I guess they never have been able to "officially" say that we had a tornado, but I guess it was sheetwinds instead. The highest recorded winds were at 106 mph, and they recorded upto golfball sized hail. We survived just fine, with us having a large part of one of our trees break off and collapse harmlessly into our yard. Sunday we ended up cutting it down as it broke apart in the trunk and would have died soon enough anyways. The worst we had happen was to be without power for 50 hours, which made for some interesting diaper changes, and we ended up throwing out a few hundred dollars worth of spoiled food. We spent about a half hour hiding out with Madison in the bathroom as the Tornado Siren's sounded, and the storm pounded. The biggest miracle of all was that no one was hurt by these storms, and after judging by the damage, I'll never know how. Anyways, now for some pictures.

This first one is a pic from inside our house, looking at our downed tree. The glare is pretty bad, but the thing to look for is the amount of hail still on the ground. Keep in mind this is about 15 minutes and a ton of rain after the storm blew through.



This is the same tree, with a little better picture of the damage, followed by pictures of the brushpile it and another branches in our yard created.





The next sets of pictures are from Washington Park up on Lake Michigan. It is sad because the park was just full of old growth oak and other trees, and they lost so many of them. It looks just baren anymore.



One of the wilder pictures was a set of bleachers that got blown for a ride...



now look how far it went. It started off next to the set of bleachers at the far left of the picture.




One more downed tree pic from the park.



My mom didn't have it nearly as lucky as we did. She had a tree fall and basically tear a back porch away from the house partially.





Finally we took a drive Sunday (storm was Wed nite) through Beverly Shores and the Pines which were hit even harder than we were. This pic really blew my mind. Look at the angles of the utility poles. Nipsco had two dozen or so trucks there trying to figure out how to fix them. Oh yeah did I mention they are all in a wetland swamp?