My Recollection of Friday, May 30th - The Tornado

Friday, May 30th, I took the boys with me to finish up cleaning out my classroom. That afternoon/early evening, we let the boys play in the sprinkler, eat dinner and then they went to bed early. Shawn was suppose to have a softball game in Noblesville. He got there and as soon as they went to take the field, lightning streaked across the sky and the umpire said the games were off. Shawn came home and chilled out awhile and then went to bed about 10:30ish. I stayed up watching TV and the weather. At about 11:00, almost out of no where, all heck broke lose. I had been watching the news, and I was surprised that they hadn't had any severe storm warnings or anything in Hancock county, but I obviously knew it was coming our way. In an instant, as I was looking out our sliding glass door, our grill was blown over, all the trees (that I could see through the rain) in our neighbors backyard were bending almost completely over, and then the sound of what sounded like rocks being thrown at our house. I immediately went up to Alex's room, because the hail was being blown directly into his side of the house. I got in there just as he woke up crying. Poor scared guy! Of course the power was out by this time. We all gathered in our room cuddled together in our bed. It didn't last long, at the most, 3 - 5 minutes. Soon, we could hear Shawn's cell phone ringing from downstairs. It was my mom calling to tell us that we were under a tornado warning. We never heard any sirens, not that we could have heard them through the wind, rain and hail. But now, looking back, I don't remember hearing them even after things settled down. Maybe it was because the power was out? Anyway, we made our way downstairs to the half bathroom...the cow bathroom. This is where we stayed for about 30 minutes. I played with my camera and the boys laid on pillows listening to Shawn's phone play songs. We all slept together in our room that night. It was probably about 1:00 before everything settled down enough for everyone to get to sleep. The next morning, we had quite a few surprises, the biggest was that our power was still out! Two sections of our neighbor's, the Henderson's, fence had been blown down. They also had 2 trees almost uprooted/blown over and (from what we can guess) the wind had picked up their glass top table and blown the glass out and shattered it on their fence. We didn't really have anything major broken or damaged. Our grill was fine, but one of the knobs wont work now. This was interesting, the boys little play "thing" (which is very heavy and has collected water in the bottom of the slide over the years) wasn't tipped over, but dragged across the yard by the wind! There was also an area of dirt that I had piled up for the boys to play in with their cars that was wiped clean. Also, the hail left a few small holes in Alex's screen, made dents in the air conditioner, and tore up the leaves of our daylillies. Later Saturday, we drove around our area, and took pictures of some of the damage. We were very blessed to be as safe and damage free as we were! We stayed at my mom and dad's house most of the day. By Saturday afternoon, since the power was still off, we decided to clean out our fridge and outside freezer and bring it all to mom and dad's since they had power. It was a nice opportunity to really clean out our fridge and get rid of a bunch of stuff! :) Since we would be staying the night at my parent's house, Saturday night we went back to our house to get our stuff for church. It was really weird! It was about 10:00 at night, and already very dark. As we drove into the neighborhood, we could see some people sitting in their driveways with fires going in their fire pits. When we pulled up to our house and turned off the car, it was pitch black and very quiet all around us. We could hear some people outside talking and a generator running in the distance. After we got everything we needed, and started back down our street, all the power came back on in the neighborhood. Our neighbors said that they could hear everyone in the neighborhood cheering. The power was out for just 30 minutes shy of 24 hours! What an experience!

Here are some pictures from the tornado.

Waiting in the cow bathroom.

I was trying something different with my camera. I was trying to take a picture without the flash. Go figure, nobody stayed completely still for the few seconds it took to take the picture! :) I thought that they were still cool though.

Brannon talking about the storm.

This is a flagpole a little over a mile from our house. It is bent in 2 places!

This house is right outside our neighborhood! It just missed their house!

This is in our neighborhood.

These next few pictures are taken from the car driving down the road less than a mile from our house. It is the road we take to go to Wal-Mart.

These two pictures are of the same tree uprooted. It was a huge tree!

We were told that a huge tree was across the road and knocked down this power line. This is right down from the entrance of our neighborhood. We were also told that there were over 50 power lines down in our area. That is why our power was out for so long. We have always had power that would go on and off really easily, but over the past couple of years, it has gotten better!