Stormageddon 2020

If there's one thing that I've learned in the last five years, it's that thunderstorms are very common in Tennessee.

And if I were to add a second item to the list of things I've learned over the last five years, it would be that severe thunderstorms are very common in Tennessee.

That being said, the storm that made it's way through the region this past Sunday morning was a completely different animal... and I've got the pictures to prove it!

I've always rather enjoyed thunderstorms, and could never understand how anyone could be afraid of them, of course there wasn't much to fear from the one's that we had when I was growing up back in Oregon. Sure, there was the occasional lightning strike, and every couple of years a small tornado would touch down in some lower populated area and take out someone's shed, but other than that, there wasn't really much to bother worrying about.

When a storm starts brewing here in Tennessee though, especially a strong storm, tornadoes are always a very real possibility, and when a tornado touches down here it tends to do a little bit more damage than just taking out someone's shed. Historically speaking, tornadoes occurring in my general are pretty uncommon, so while severe thunderstorms may produce wind gusts upwards of 60 mph, inches of rain, and plenty of ground shaking, the thought of tornadoes hadn't really ever entered my mind... at least not until last month!

Back on March 3rd, at a little before 2:30 in the AM, we had a pretty intense thunderstorm roll through. I believe it may have been mentioned nationally, but if not, this storm was part of the system that produced tornadoes in Cookeville (about forty minutes away from me) and Nashville, which led to the deaths of 25 people (19 in Cookeville). That storm was bad, to say the least, but we in the local surroundings didn't get the full brunt of it, so other than some downed tree limbs, there really wasn't much evidence of it's ever having been here -- unfortunately, the same can not be said about this past Sunday's storm.

I have always been a very light sleeper, and even though it might sound like woo woo to some, have always had a knack for waking up before the first signs of an approaching thunderstorm, I like to think of it as being able to detect a disturbance in the force (a rare Star Wars reference). Usually this just results in me waking up, wondering why I woke up, then I hear the first roll of thunder off in the distance and get annoyed, because I know I won't be able to fall back asleep until it passes. Such was the case this past Sunday morning, once again just a little bit before 2:30 in the AM, although it became evident pretty quickly that this wasn't going to be your average run-of the-mill thunderstorm!

I woke up a couple of minutes before the first roll of thunder, which, although still about as far away as my ears could detect, sounded a bit different, almost like a large footstep. My attention was officially grabbed a minute or two later though, when the next roll came, as it was much closer than it should've been, and as silly as it might sound, I broke out in a cold sweat when the next rumble came, which was now only a couple of miles away -- this storm was moving fast, and even a transplant like myself knows that that's never a good sign.

I don't really know how to describe it properly, other than to say that the approaching thunder was not dissimilar to the approach of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, although Godzilla would've been more apt for those footsteps, as every boom sounded like an explosion.

The wind actually arrived first, a wind like I've never experienced! I've never been in a hurricane, but I would have to imagine that the sounds were pretty similar, and as it would later be determined, it was indeed hurricane strength winds. The generator (the power grid is very fragile around here, so a generator is an investment worth making) came on almost immediately after the first blast of wind, another bad sign.

The thunder and lightning wasn't too far behind the wind, which was then followed by the torrential rain/hail. The whole house was creaking and popping, and the sound of the wind was almost deafening. At some point I realized that I was even holding breath, just trying to listen, for what I do not know. Being all the way out where I am, there are no tornado sirens, so you're only real option is to take shelter if you know/think that something is coming -- I am a dummy, so I of course just kept laying in bed, hoping that it would pass soon.

The actual storm probably only ended up lasting about ten minutes, but it felt like an eternity. After the storm had passed, I heard two loud explosions come from the direction that it went, and I still don't know what those were. I never did go back to sleep, but waited until about 5:30 to finally get up. The generator was still on when I did (it ended up being on for 12 hours), and the internet was out, but was back on by the time I got done eating breakfast.

I knew that things were gonna be bad outside, but still being dark, I had to wait until after breakfast to go out and see just how bad they were. Obviously I knew that no trees had come through the house, but I was a bit worried about the roof, which *knocks on this wood desk* thankfully ended up being okay, a lot of other people in the surrounding counties weren't as lucky.

Other than being splattered with mud (think chimpanzee trying to create a Jackson Pollock), the house was/is just fine, but the rest of the property took a bit of a beating.

The pond is one of the first things you notice when looking out the patio door, or at least it is when there's not a 40ft pine down in front of it.

I knew that this tree was going to come down someday, so this wasn't the end of the world, but I do wish that it hadn't obliterated the two young sycamore's in it's path. Although on the flip side of that, it could've fallen into the pond, which would've made the clean up a little more difficult.

The shed behind the house became a pillow for this pine.

Had this tree fallen square in the middle of the shed, it probably would've went right through, so it obviously could've been worse. As such, one of the roof beams was cracked, and a couple pieces of the metal roofing got crumpled, but both are fixable, and the tree has since been gotten off of the roof.

If these two trees, and the hundreds of branch bits strewn all over everywhere (not shown), had been the only casualties, then things might not have been so bad considering. Unfortunately this wasn't the case...

Welcome to tornado alley! This is looking down the driveway from the house. Had I taken this photo prior to Sunday morning, you would've seen many more standing trees, now it's a just a mess of about a dozen on the ground, including two from next door that I highly doubt will be taken care of by anyone other than me. All the leaning trees in the background are on the neighbor's property, they didn't used to be doing that.

As you can see, it's quite the mess. And the best part (sarcasm) was that a few just had to fall across the driveway as well.

Obviously clearing the driveway was priority numero uno, and was done by Sunday afternoon, as was witnessed by the many people who seemed to be driving around looking for damage to gawk at.

As I mentioned, the power ended up being out for twelve hours (thank god for the generator!), as there were apparently power lines down all over, most of which were of course taken out by fallen trees. And there was quite a bit of property damage reported in all of the surrounding counties.

I saw on a local news site that the National Weather Service was investigating the storm, I guess we needed them to tell us that a bunch of sh*t got f*cked up before it could be considered official. A few days later they determined that Sparta - which I'm technically apart of, but live about 900 feet above the actual town - had an Ef-0 tornado (which may or may not be responsible for the train that got blown over) , and Crossville - which I live almost closer too than Sparta - had sustained winds of 95 MPH. And we had news helicopter (probably from Knoxville) flying over on Sunday, and Monday afternoon, which told me that there must've been a bunch of juicy destruction around, because they're not going to send one of their vultures all the way out here for nothing.

This was not a fun storm, and the aftermath certainly hasn't been fun, but the house didn't sustain any damage, so things definitely could've been much worse. From what I've seen online, these storms caused quite a mess across most of middle and east TN, thankfully there wasn't any loss of life this time though.

I've spent everyday this week, except for Wednesday, cleaning up, and have barely scratched the surface in doing so. I'm not complaining, but I've also been pretty tired as of late, and the old brain doesn't seem to currently be firing on all of it's synapses, hence the lack of blog posts... and my having to sit on the sidelines for Matt's April Fool's festivities!

And I haven't even started packaging up everyone's claims from last week's Free Stuff Friday, but plan to start doing so sometime this weekend, so hopefully I'll be able to get most of it out by next week.

Oh, and I got a wood chip stuck in my eye while chainsawing yesterday (it went under my sunglasses), which as you can probably imagine, wasn't very fun. It took me almost ten minutes to get it out, and the residual soreness feels like I got punched in the eye -- take my word for it when I say that you never want to do this! So all in all it's been an awesome last couple of days... how's your week going?


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.