The Wind Done Blowed, or a Taco Warning

The wind, the wind, dear God the wind!

Welp, when you live in Ohio, tornados are a possibility.   

They usually travel from the west and southwest to the east and northeast.  Unlike the slower hurricane and its downgraded kin, the tropical storm gives you models and paths on weather stations so you can prepare and if need be evacuate to someplace dry.  

Tornados and their equally scary kin, the straight-line wind derecho, are fickle.  Here one minute - which can seem like hours - and gone the next.  Both leave a path of destruction.  But a tornado on the ground is deadly, and it can flatten one town, or pick off houses in a subdivision.  

Cookie remembers the big July 4, 1969 storm, and the Xenia Tornado that erased half of the city of Xenia and left us in fear for the the family we had living in its path.

On Tuesday, we were supposed to get storms, and many either disappeared from the radar or shifted course.

In the mid-afternoon however, we started getting a lot of thunder that lasted for about a half hour, and the milky gray sky looked dark to the west-northwest.  Radar showed a large line of thunderstorms heading south over Lake Erie*.  Cookie shut his computer down, went downstairs, made a cup of coffee, and flipped on the TV.

Within minutes we were in a tornado warning, then the heavy rain started, and then the wind done blowed, hard, and it was a prolonged blowing at that.  

Now, let me explain something.  A Tornado Watch means that the weather can make a tornado.  A Tornado Watch means it's happening right now, take cover.   A lot of people don't take a Tornado Warning seriously because of the haphazard way they form, so the state of Pennsylvania came up with this taco explanation because everyone gets it:

So Cookie called the husband down from his office and told him to bring Kevin with him - we were going to the basement, NOW.  By the time he got downstairs, the rain was moving sideways.  And we stayed down there, each of us holding a small dog - until Betsy Kling - the weather Goddess of Cleveland's WKYC showed that the front moved to our east. 

There were a few small limbs down in our neighborhood, but the power was on, and so were cable and internet. 

However, on the west side of Cleveland, things were a bit messier with large limbs and trees down on houses, cars, etc.  A few large buildings (rec centers) lost roofing.  In Willoughby Hills, to our east about 8 miles or so, the fire department sustained damage.  All in all, it was mostly straight-line winds (84mph at Bratenhal along Lake Erie) and two confirmed smallish tornados. No deaths were reported, which is always good. 

The electric grid is not so great.  

We never lost power, but the next-door neighbor did.  To our south, blogger Blobby reports power was/is out at his house.  All in all, at its peak, The Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company (CEI) - such a wonderful name for a utility - parent company, First Energy (an organization that is so corrupt that it almost brought down state government in a massive kickback financial scandal) announce that over 400,000 were without power after the storm.  Yesterday, that was downgraded to 300,000, but today people are getting updates that it could be next week before they are restored. 

So we are safe, the dogs are good, and nothing came through these massive original picture windows that we have.

On a final note, Weather Goddess Betsy Kling did issue a warning against playing in the pooling storm water.  "Kids do not play in that stormwater...it is Mother Nature's toilet overflowing."  She ain't kidding.  Like the Taco analogy, that is something you remember.

But now I want Tacos. And we are thankful we don't live in states were tornado sean brings massive destruction.

*For those of you not in North America, the Great Lakes - Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and Ontario follow the naming convention of Lake then Name. Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes, Ontario is the smallest, and Lake Superior, the largest, isn't really a lake is an inland sea.