Month: August 2008

After last night’s run-in with a tornado (or maybe it was just a funnel cloud right near the ground, not sure) I wanted to get some daylight photos of the damage. In short, this was really lucky.

As you can see there, a large portion of the tree was detached from it and this fell right next to my neighbor’s house and my porch. Here is where the limb was ripped off of the tree, here is the damaged end of the limb itself, and this shows how far the limb ended up from the tree.

While the fallen tree limb was completely covering my neighbor’s air conditioning condenser it just barely touched the building itself, hitting it only hard enough to slightly bend the gutter and create a low / sagging spot. Because my neighbor was having some difficulty getting in touch with the condo association’s emergency number to get the tree limb moved three of her sons came by and cut it up and moved it out of the way. I guess my neighbor is also having a new fridge delivered today so she wanted to ensure that there was a sufficient path for the Sears delivery people to get the fridge to her door.

So, uh, there was a tornado here. Around 8:40pm Danielle and I were heading back to my house. Right as we got close to 22 Mile along Schoenherr we saw a VERY large column of white-ish cloud maybe 100′ across extending from the bottom of the rest of the clouds down to the ground right about where my condo is. It was scary enough that I immediately turned the wrong way and started heading west on 22 Mile to avoid being near or crossing its path.

After traveling for about a mile we turned back and what had been a column was now dissipating, tumbling along and eventually breaking up. I then drove up to 23 Mile (next road north) and looked around for any signs of damage, but I didn’t see anything obvious. The wind had also calmed until it was almost nothing, so we just went inside to eat.

Later this evening Danielle and I wandered outside to view the lightning and saw that the tree right next to my porch had had a large section, around 25′ long and weighing enough that I couldn’t budge it, torn out of it and deposited right next to my porch and on top of my neighbor’s air conditioner. Thankfully it only brushed the building, slightly bending the gutter.

(Yes, I know that photo is crap, but it’s very difficult to focus in the dark, particularly when only using flash. I’ll get more pictures tomorrow. Here is another photo of the downed tree limb and broken main tree, but it was taken while standing in the rain and is equally crap.)