Tornado in the Neighborhood

Around 2 a.m. I was stirred from my slumber by an unusual number of police, ambulance and fire truck sirens out on S. Clairborne Ave. While it's normal to hear these a few times every night, last night it seemed particularly persistent. I went back to sleep. Around 6:30 a.m. the streets outside were still wet from rain, so rather than ride out to the levee I got on the trainer to put in an hour of inside torture. The Wife came in shortly afterward with news of the tornado that had struck the Carrollton area where we live. While we slept, a tornado had ripped through the area abour a quarter mile from us, doing some major damage to one of my sisters' house and minor damage to the other's. I uploaded some photos I took when we went to check on her this morning - take a look. Oh yeah, The Sister confirmed that tornados really do sound like freight trains. She's still a little shaken up and most of the neighbors are all just kind of wandering around in the street in shock.

I didn't drive through the worst-hit areas, since traffic was all tied up and lots of streets were closed off or impassable because of downed trees and power lines. It's really quite a mess. At The Sister's house, large patches of roof shingles were ripped off, a tree branch damaged the roof, and another tree branch took out two of the car windows. Around the back of the house where there is a flat roof, a number of bricks from the neighbor's chimney came through the roof and landed in the bedroom. It will be a while before they have power again in that area. There are a number of large broken-off branches lodged up in the trees (aka "widomakers), and you can see the classic tornado photos of corrugated metal roofing wrapped around telephone poles. They were already on the phone with the insurance company when we arrived, and hopefully they can get the worst of it taken care of relatively quickly.

So of course I didn't get in my usual Tuesday long ride, and 45 minutes on the trainer was about all I could get in before I had to head off to check on The Sister's place. It's a conspiracy, I tell ya.'