Stormy Weather

It didn't start out all that bad. Murky weather with predicted thunderstorms. The Beloved said: "I'll take you to work", and so he did.

Within half an hour of me getting there was a weather alert: stay away from windows, there's a big thunderstorm coming. Then the lights started to flicker. Then everything went dark.

We had lost all power. As my workspace has no windows it was black as the night so I went into production, where it was only slightly better; outside it was pitch dark, the trees across the road were blowing sideways and the downspouts were shooting rivers of rain across the parking lot.
Quite a few cars had pulled up to wait it out, and we rescued a cyclist who was trying to shelter up against the building. We are located uphill and downhill the road was completely flooded. Ambulances, firetrucks ... everything was flying past us.
I called the Beloved who was in Kalamazoo with no sign of the storm. Yet.

An hour later we still had no power so it was decided some of us were going home. I tried calling the Beloved again, but cell towers were overloaded too and calls wouldn't go through. I left him a message. Then he left me a message that he was trying to get home but roads everywhere were blocked by down trees. And plowtrucks were being used to get those trees off the road.

He finally came to pick me up and we went home where we had no power either.

We heard that the Beloved's brother had a tree fall on their garage, and since we needed to go in that direction anyway to go check on a friend's house we stopped by. Their whole street looks like a tornado hit them.
In fact, the road leading up to their street looks like that.
Half the area looks like that.
We stopped at Joe's farm and saw many cherry trees down. A lot of the corn in the area looks completely flattened (though in spots we could see it bouncing back already). Grapevines have fallen over.
According to the weather channel the storms contained all of the characteristics of a "derecho", defined as a widespread, long-lived windstorm associated with a band of rapidly moving showers and storms. Windgusts up to 80 mph (about 128 kph) were recorded.
66% Of the people (not us) in our county are still without power. Our yard back and front was a mess of broken branches, but nothing serious. Other houses in our street weren't all that lucky.

But the Squire took the roof off my bird house and sits in it, quite content and sleepy. Yes, this is a very definite yawn.
Go figure :/


Storm photos + damage