The story begins Wednesday, April 9, 2008.
It started out with almost continuous lightning and raucous thunder. The sky was lit up with the lightning almost as bright as sunlight. The thunder, lightning, and rain continued almost non-stop. At some point during the night, I was awakened by a bright flash of lightning, a loud thunderclap, and what souned like a tree being hit by lightning. I did not have my rain guage out, so I had no idea how much rain we got overnight. It sure sounded like plenty. We lost power sometime during the night.
The power came on again around 2am Thursday. It was still on when we woke up at 6am.
Around 6:30am, Colleen was sitting in the living room putting her shoes on. Suddenly things got very, very dark, windy, and torrential rains come down. The power went out immediately. I was sure it was a tornado (we were under a tornado watch). The wind was beating relentlessly against the windows. It frightened us so much, we ran to the bathroom and hid there until it passed.
When we finally came out of the bathroom, we saw part of a pine tree lying next to the dining room window. It was continuing to rain, though nowhere as heavily as it had just been. We took a short walk outside to see what had happened. We saw that the pine tree had fallen in such a way that the outer top branches just brushed the dining room roof.
When the rain stopped and the sun came out, we started walking around our property to check out what happened. We saw six or seven more pine trees which had fallen behind our garden shed. Most of them fell against another large oak tree. One tree fell into a cedar tree just behind the garden shed and thus the shed was spared any damage. The front yard was littered with pine branches.
We then walked down the driveway that goes out the northernmost part of our property. We saw even more pine trees, and some oaks, that had fallen over from the roots, had snapped down near the bottom, or had been twisted off the trunk a few feet from the ground. During that walk we saw the remains of a pine tree which had been struck by lightning, charred from the top to the bottom, with a barber-pole like stripe down the tree where bark had come off when the lightning struck.
All in all, we counted two-dozen (at least) trees that had gone down during the storm. They were in such a straight-line pattern, it sure seemed like it was from a tornado.
Then we walked down to the "gentle" creek that flows across the road a little further north of our property. This creek, usually a few feet wide and either very dry or with a gentle flow, was now at least ten feet across with the water rushing in a mad torrent. That made me think we must have received several inches of water since the storm had started just a few hours earlier.
We also saw another pine tree which had fallen from our property across the dirt road at the east of our property effectively blocking any exit to civilization. There is another creek to the southeast of us that we found out was so bad that even the trucks from the electric company would not cross. Trees were down all up and down the road. In one spot the road was covered with water where there is not even a creek.
Later that afternoon, I discovered the pine tree that fell outside our dining room was not one but TWO pine trees.
Oh, yes, the electric company. The storm had snapped four power poles in half and it took them most of the day to replace them and get power back. The power came back at 8pm. It was the next day before we had telephone service.
This was more excitement than we could stand and we were exhausted.
