I love big storms and he's just as curious as I am so we couldn't resist running outside to take a look. It was raining and the clouds were swirling all around just above the tops of the trees. Pea-sized hail started to come down and I decided to head in. We had already tossed the cats into the basement so I went and checked out the TV again. The sirens were still wailing. I called my mom (she lives just a few blocks away) and asked her if they were in the basement. "We are and you'd better be too!" she admonished me.
Suddenly B bursts in from the garage and his skittishness infects me too.
"Do we need to head downstairs?"
"I don't know, but I saw the neighbor guy booking it indoors so I figured I'd better get inside too!" He says this with a mixture of anxiety, wonderment and excitement. We open the door to head downstairs and our calico feline, Alabama, darts out like a multicolored bullet and runs away. Cursing her I give chase and grab her as she heads up to the second floor.
That darn cat will sit and whine at the door to the basement on any other day, but when she needs to be down there, she wants nothing to do with it. Typical cat!
The basement is actually our roommate's apartment but he's away at his job for months yet so it's just the four of us--me, the Big B and our furry feline children. To say our rommate's a minimalist is an extreme understatement, so we had no TV to watch downstairs to keep up with what was happening. The view out the windows was poor because of the rain spatter and it was maddening to be stuck downstairs with no information. I told B to keep his mom on the phone for updates, but soon enough it was over and we were able to head back upstairs.
The aftermath was significant. Large parts of North Minneapolis were hit, not very far from our house. My bus route to work was detoured because Lyndale avenue had blocks of downed trees obstructing the road.
I managed to snap some photos from the bus ride home later that week after the road had been cleared. I apologize for the horrible picture quality but that's the best you're gonna get with a cell phone camera taken from inside a moving vehicle.
The pic doesn't do justice to how big this downed tree was.
It took up the entire backyard of this home.
Clean up crews busy working
Later that week the Big B picked me up from work and I made him take Lyndale rather than the freeway so I could snap a few more photos from the car. Slightly better pics--you can really see how powerful this storm was and how much damage these trees did when they came down. A lot of the downed trees were boulevard ones with growth that was constrained by the sidewalks and infrastructure of a major city.
The fallen tree had been removed from this house
already but you can see the damage it left behind.
Hundreds of homes were damaged, some much more
severely than this one.
After all these crappy cell phone shots of the damage I was itching to get my actual camera out and take closer pics so I drove myself and B out to a park thirty or so blocks away from our house.
He snuck in this shot
It's so random how nature takes some trees while
one right next to them is spared.
The Big B provides some perspective
for the scale of the root system
The picture above and the next three below are all of the same tree.
If I had jumped down into the bottom of the hole
left by the roots, I'd have been half as tall in this picture.
These kids were playing and were eager to show us
the debris they'd found.
I wish that pictures would do more justice to how incredibly LARGE all these trees were. I would back up to where I thought I could get the sheer scale and size framed in the picture, and then would have to back up some more, and some more, before I felt I had gotten it okay. Eventually I gave up and used the us to provide some scale in a few shots (willingly and unwittingly, depending!).
As much as I love storms and would like to see a tornado up close & personal (as safely as possible), I don't like seeing how much damage they can do and how much injury they cause people.
The N. Mpls community was reeling from this. It's one of the poorer areas in Minnesota and it's just another strike of Murphy's Law that this was the area hit so heavily with damage. The people really pulled together and now less than two weeks after the storms hit, the clean up is well on it's way to being completed. It's gratifying to see how even a "bad" neighborhood can pull together and help each other out when times are rough. People are reaching out to one another and offering aid while clean up efforts continue and homes are repaired enough so that the owners can return.
I'm grateful we were spared this type of damage in our area and that I could safely see the aftermath of one of nature's temper tantrums.
It puts you in your place to see a 5-story tree knocked over like a matchstick.
