Texas Tormdaoes

A number of folks have written expressing concern, so please let me put those fears to rest. We are fine.

We missed the 11 tornadoes across the local area that started touching down midafternoon and persisted into the evening. We also fortunately did miss the hail though, apparently, there was not nearly as much of that as one would expect with these kinds of storms.  

We did not escape totally unscathed as we had a lightning strike just before two pm yesterday afternoon that took out our power till nearly ten last night. During a break in the storms, we went out and got ice for our two coolers and saved part of the contents of the fridge as our restoration time kept being moved back by Oncor. After the final line of severe weather came through between just after 7 and 8:30 last night, power crews came back and got us up and running.

As the power came on, we heard a very strange noise. Soon Dallas Fire Rescue was parked in the street in front of the house as two transformers behind a neighbor’s house across the street exploded and caught fire. The fire truck left about twenty minutes later and one thought everything was fine.

It was not as over the next two hours, two more transformers on that same ally exploded and caught fire. That meant the flashing lights of fire trucks and utility trucks made repeated visits up and down our street as things went sideways. As this went on to well after midnight, it did not make for a calming evening. I kept what we had salvaged in the two coolers over night as the fridge needed time to chill down and I was not convinced the power would stay on.

It did and I am glad.

I also admit to flinching every time sirens got close today. Ambulances have been in the neighborhood a lot today, as they have since late last week, and as the majority of residents in this area are my age or older, I suspect we might be seeing the start of another Covid wave here. This same sort of thing has happened each time there has been a surge. In each case, we have had ambulances here in the neighborhood several times a day for about a week and then the local officials start warning of a surge.  

Whether it is happening again, I don’t know. I do know we lost a lot of the refrigerator contents as Amazon Fresh had delivered last Friday, but things could have been way worse as various places in our area, around Texas, as well as Oklahoma showed yesterday and the city of New Orleans is showing tonight with another tornado on the ground there as I write this.

All in all, we got very lucky and things could have easily been way worse.