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One Year Later

It's one year today since the tornado hit our neighborhood.  Yes, I know I continue to whine about it like a mule, but if a big effing column of wind hit your house you'd be slightly concerned, too.

Many of you have already seen my take on what happened.  Here's my neighbor's take.  A little post-traumatic stress aside, everyone seems to be doing much better.  Although today is Friday the 13th, last year it was a Thursday night when we came up out of our basement to see our street transformed by downed trees, smashed cars and crushed houses.

As you can see, some things have changed.

Before


After

Before

After

Finally, FINALLY the repairs are complete, though the mess, as you can see from the amount of mud in the backyard, is not.  The expense and effort have been enormous, at least by our standards.  Final bill: $32,155.35.  And that doesn't include the cars.

The neighborhood is slowly coming back to itself.  Though most of the old trees are gone, the houses, at least, are looking a might bit better.

Before

After

Apparently there's a shindig tomorrow in the neighborhood to celebrate the anniversary, or else huddle together for warmth, because yesterday when I woke up there was snow on the ground.

Never a dull moment around here.

2006, Good Riddance

As 2006 winds to a very welcome close, I'd like to reflect on the horror that's been the past year.

First, a very big pffpht to the tornado, for destroying my garage, two cars, half the roof, all the siding on the house, thirteen windows and the entire backyard.

Second, a pffpht to the insurance company, for taking so long to assess the damage and not giving us enough to cover all of it.

Third, a big middle finger to the construction company, which did such a bad job that even now I'm having to hire people to undo the work they did. To whit:

Who would look at this window and think the repair was done correctly?  I mean, WHO??? Bowel (B) Movement (M) Construction out of Cedar Rapids, that's who.

Finally, an extra-special "up yours" to the universe, for four failed IVF cycles and a second miscarriage.

Now, lest you think it's all negative around here, here's a few things I am thankful for:

For the small furry things that live in my house:

My family, for being so blessedly normal;

My husband:

who always makes me laugh;

My friends, for always knowing when (and how much) I need them.

Here's to a happy, healthy, and tornado-free 2007.  Blessings to all of you.

The Other Natural Disaster

Thanks everyone once again for your kind wishes.  There have been a lot of bad days around here lately, and some days that weren't so bad.  The better days have usually been the ones when I was able to write something on the new book.  This is the writer's curse--when the book's going badly, everything else seems worse in comparison.  When the book's going well, even the horrible stuff is a little easier to deal with.

It's been six months since the tornado hit our house, and we (finally!) have the majority of the damage cleaned up, though the backyard still looks like the storm happened just yesterday.  The Idiot-Run Construction Company did a piss-poor, laughably terrible job on certain things (photos of which are forthcoming in a future post).  But the windows are on, at least, now that the cold weather's here.

Here are some pics of the tornado taken around town that night.  Some of them are quite beautiful.

This one, I am convinced, was taken on our street, mostly because the big tree in the middle looks just like one that's still there, and because the direction of the funnel would be about right:

All things considered, I think we were pretty lucky that night.
 

Nervous

Just as we've finally begun to get things back to a semblance of normalcy around here, the sirens went off again. 

We bought a new car over the weekend and went to Nashville to pick it up from the auto auction, only to find on our first day home that we couldn't get it out of park.  Had to get it up to Cedar Rapids to find out that the previous owner had spilled pop in the gearshaft, which necessitated a fifty-dollar cleaning.  I bought spring flowers to put in the garden at the front of the house and dug holes today amid bits of broken glass.  On Sunday we discovered the lawnmower, which was in the garage when the tornado hit, doesn't work.  The insurance company underestimated the cost of repairing the roof, which means that we have to fight with them about adjustment before we can begin any kind of repairs.  I have a feeling the roof is not going to be the only fight we'll have with them--the contractor said we will not be able to rebuild the garage the way it was (the only thing the insurance company will pay for) because the old concrete pad is cracked and buckling. 

The backyard looks like we had a demolition derby back there:

Last night we were awoken by some very close flashes of lightning and thunder.  I figured we weren't in any real danger--our spanking-new weather radio would have gone off if there'd been a tornado spotted--but B and I both had trouble getting back to sleep.

This evening, as we were finishing dinner, the tornado sirens went off again.  This seemed pretty odd to me, as the sun was out.  We checked the local TV stations and saw that there were tornadoes spotted just to the north, near Solon: 

The litttle cancer-like spots on the radar reminded us that yes, it could all happen again, and this time maybe we wouldn't be so lucky.

It's been a long, long month, but we're coming out of it.  Next door scaffolding is going up to replace the neighbor's roof.  Across the street the crushed house is slowly being demolished.  We will never look at clouds the same way, but I did get my rosebushes planted today, in a little break in the rain.

Exhaustion

You know how sometimes there are weeks and months when you feel like life has thrown absolutely everything it can at you?  How the universe, or God, or the animal spirits have just decided that this is the time you're going to have to deal with some sh**, get used to it?

Yeah.  That's now.

There are other things going on besides the book coming out and a tornado hitting my house.  So far this week the metaphorical disaster (icebergs! get it?!) have taken a big backseat to the actual disaster.  But I've also had three doctor's appointments and I'm trying to find a job so I won't have to eat the cat's food (although I wonder if that would be good for the ol' diet?) and and and.

This morning we found out both of the cars have been totalled.  The older car was not a surprise, but the newer one was, and it pretty much blindsided me.  The car we were planning on keeping until it fell apart is now going to be sold for parts.  The really, really old car, with 107,000 miles on it that I was praying would last until the end of the year, is also junk.  And now we have to replace them both.  And find the money to pay for it.

I wish I could have a big, big drink right now, but I will have to settle for leftover Easter candy.  A chocolate hangover is better than a real one anyway.

Gawking the Gawkers

This sign pretty much sums it up:

Since the tornado we've had hundreds of people on our street, either driving by or taking a stroll, cameras and camcorders in hand.  Now I understand the appeal of a good natural disaster as much as the next person, but these folks are actually getting in the way of workers, insurance agents and cleanup crews trying to get help to the folks who live here.  A street that perhaps had 1-2 cars an hour before the tornado now has many, many times that number.

Folks here are starting to get frustrated, not only with the gawkers but the total lack of information from insurance companies on where we stand.  How long will I have to wait to get my roof repaired?  Why have I not seen the insurance adjuster yet?  All up and down the block people lose patience.

On the other hand, workers from the state are here cleaning up the pile that used to be my garage.  Neighbors and volunteers have come out of the woodwork to lend each other a hand in ways I've rarely seen before.  Though no one seems to know who's in charge, we're managing to persevere.

Now if only the gawkers would do something helpful instead of taking pictures.  Anyone want to reroof my house?

Damage

So there's bad news, and then there's BAD NEWS.  So much for turning 35.

The good news is, we're OK.

Here is the bad news:

This used to be our garage, by the way.

The tornado came through Wednesday night around 9 p.m.  I was on the phone with my sister just before it happened, listening to the sirens and the hail fall on the house. Every time the sirens went off, we went down to the basement, and I kept an eye on the sky, as I always do during these storms, since I grew up in the Midwest and know how fast bad weather can turn nasty.  But we still had power, and as long as you have power you don't think too much of the sirens.

At one point I'd come back upstairs and was looking out the window.  There were green flashes of lightning to the southeast.  That's not lightning, I thought.  Those are transformers going down.

The power went out.  Into the basement we went.

I heard a low rumbling sound, the kind you hear about but never think to hear yourself.  It sounds less like a freight train and more like a big column of wind.

For a moment I looked out the window of the basement door and saw, over the top of the neighbor's roof, silhouetted by lightning, the funnel cloud coming toward the house.

We have two small rooms in our old basement, one under the kitchen we use to store paint.  It has no windows, unlike the old coal room, so we grabbed the cats, shut the door and waited for the house to be removed from over our heads.  And yes, I use the passive voice here deliberately.

It took about 20-30 seconds to happen altogether.  The walls were shaking, and we could hear, in addition to the roar, crashing noises coming from overhead.  Our ears popped from the sudden change in pressure.  The cats mewled and panted around our feet, and then it was quiet.

There was broken glass and grit all over the living room, and in the kitchen a plate had fallen from the dish rack onto the floor.  Upstairs the windows in both closets had blown and and scattered bits of leaves and sticks and shingles into the house.  On the front porch nearly every window was blown in and many of them lay broken on the floor.  One of the big trees in the front yard lost a large branch that barely missed not only our house but the house just to the east of us:   

Our garage and our neighbors' lay in the alley, but the cars were still there, sitting right where we'd left them:

The house on the west side lost most of its roof.  The grit on our windows you see here is from the storm, some of which got inside when the window by the stairs broke:

The house across the street was crushed by a falling tree:

We came outside to check on the neighbors and survey the damage.  It was dark and we had no radio; power seemed to be out all over town, but the house was standing, and despite some broken windows, some minor roof damage and the garage, all we lost was our sense of invincibility in the face of nature.

We were one of the lucky ones, though.  Our street looked like a bomb went off.  There were crushed cars and downed trees everywhere.  At one point I looked up into the bedroom of a house where the wall had fallen away and saw the back of someone's waterbed.  The college kids who live at the end of the block were getting drunk and showing off the branch that had pierced their kitchen cabinets from the outside.  But everyone was out checking on each other, and emergency crews were already out with chains saws trying to clear the roads of debris.

As far as we knew, the whole town was in the kind of shape we were in, and we were without a storm radio, so we went in search of friends and neighbors to make sure everyone was OK and see what the news was.  There were rumors about what else had been destroyed, including, at one point, the unversity library, but that turned out to be false in the light of the next morning.  Enough other things were destroyed, however.

In true tornado fashion, the damage goes in a nearly straight line from the southwest to the northeast, right through the middle of town, and stops not far from our house.  The higher-elevation areas in town were hit harder than we were, which B and I saw the next day when we went out to scavenge food and news, but Iowa Avenue looks pretty bad and so does the College Green area, all places that we loved when we moved here and that will never be the same again.

Yesterday and today bands of volunteers have been through with chain saws to clear the streets well enough that you can drive down them, and this afternoon a man with a Bobcat cleared what's left of our garage out of the alley as well as the tree stumps and the neighbor's roof.  We're waiting for the roofing guy to come by to check out the projectiles sticking out of our shingles, and the debris company to come by to clear off the garage, and we've boarded up the broken windows until we can figure out how to to replace the irreplaceable.

But we have power again.  We still have a roof.  All in all, it could have been much, much worse.