So, you may or may not have heard about the awful storm that blew through Iowa on Monday, August 10th. The weathermen called it a “Derecho” which is a storm with straight-line winds, the highest mile-per-hour winds detected were 140! It was not a tornado, there was no funnel cloud! The damage, however, was as if a tornado had hit.
Citizens were comparing what happened to a hurricane, and in some ways it was worse. Hurricanes can be predicted, and people who are in the path have many days, or even weeks, to prepare for the hit. We only had a few minutes to prepare, and we didn’t realize that this storm was going to be as bad as it was.
These are some images of the damage (they were struggling to load as I wrote this, hopefully that fixes itself when this is published) to give you an idea of what happened. We weren’t even hit that bad! There were houses with walls down, and roofs just gone. It was crazy to see all the damage, and really devastating. Everyone in my family is safe, which is very lucky. Unfortunately, not everyone was safe. A friend of mine had a tree fall on their house! The whole tree was uprooted, too!
It took many days to clean up the mess. There was trash everywhere because this storm happened on a Monday, which happened to be the day before our trash pickup day. Which also means everyone’s trash cans were full. And trash cans were tipped over and thrown around, throwing trash everywhere too.
Then there was the amount of leaves and tree branches everywhere as well. We have a tree in the front of our house which snapped in half. I told you these winds were strong! My dad spent all evening, when he came home from work, cleaning up small branches and cutting up trees and big branches that had fallen.
We did, eventually, get it all cleaned up and put it on our curb where it still sits today. Yep. You read that right. The debris is all still on the curb, all of it. I’m not sure it’ll ever get picked up. It’s been there for more than a month now, and there have been no signs of anyone coming to pick up the (now dead) branches.
That’s not all the storm did, either. It knocked out power for a long time. Some people got it back within a few days, while others were out for a few weeks. It took even longer for our internet to come back, yet phone data came back a bit sooner.
This was a time where everything you took for granted was taken away, and you realized how much you relied on those things and how little gratitude you gave those things. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live without power every day of your life.
That’s basically my Derecho story. This won’t be the only story about storms, but until another one comes it will be. I hope you enjoy this blog post! I’ll do my best to get them out when I can. And with that, that’s the end of this post. Stay tuned!