A Day In The Life - 10/05: What A Storm!

What a powerful micro-burst we had in our neighborhood - and all over the valley. There was hail on the west side of town, some of it as big as tennis balls, denting car bodies and breaking windows in cars and houses. There were tornado-like winds that up-rooted treas and tore branches loose. It tore roofs off of buildings and generally made a mess of everything.
At our house we were worried about the trees. As we drove home from work we saw trees up-rooted and damaged all along the way. When we arrived in our neighborhood there was even more evidence of the storm - especially with lots of toppled mesquite trees.
One of the first things we noticed was that there was lots of stuff scattered across our yard. All of the lawn furniture was scattered around and there was lots and lots of debris. Then we noticed that some of the debris was roofing tiles and found that a large portion of the roof of our shed was torn off (and then it leaked some inside - but nothing inside was water damaged. Whew!)
Next we noticed roof tiles from our house scattered in the east side yard. also, we could see where a lot of the decorative tiles had been torn loose. We could also see some other tiles along the edge of our two-story home out of alignment and hanging precariously.
Gaye suggested that the yard looked like it had woken up from a hangover. The garden shade had been torn down. Puddles - small lakes, actually - stood in the garden as well as on the lawn. The wood standing against the shed is pretty much destroyed. But it was ready to go, anyway.
But our trees survived the storm perfectly intact. Hooray!


Finally, I walked around to the west side yard and found that the wind had taken our green refuse barrel, flipped it over, spun it around from the corner of the house to the gate and shoved the corner of it through the double-paned window. There was a lot of glass to clean up inside but, amazingly, no water.
Now is when we are VERY grateful for good insurance. With a small deductible and a good agent it will be taken care of with minimal involvement from us. It will take a bit longer than usual because there are SO many claims because of this storm.
As you can see, this storm was so fierce that it tore down several telephone poles along Southern Ave along the way that we take Gaye to school. They were replacing the old wooden poles with the metal/cement ones, which probably last longer and are stronger. They lost about 10 poles along this stretch and some along Elliot, over in Chandler.