Sunday evening myself and my fellow employees watched the sky turn from pink to black in the early evening as a massive storm swept up and dropped buckets of rain on us in a powerful, though quick thunderstorm. The lights flickered about 4 times, but we never lost power. I thought nothing of the storm until I was driving home and the power for the entire town beside mine was knocked out and there were downed trees, fallen power poles, damaged houses.
We made the news, My town and the town next door, which is where my husband mother and grandparents live.
[link]There are catastrophe relief vehicles in fruitport, and their working around the clock to take care of the dozens of downed power lines and exploded transformers. The damage in those pictures happened not even 5 miles from my house, and we got little more then a messy yard with hundreds of branches all over.
My parents were trapped at their house all night from 4 fallen trees across the driveway and hidden drive about a mile and a half from our house. My husbands grandparents have a destroyed fence and a massive oak tree that's now on an ominous angle over their house and looks to tip over any time now. Their neighbor have a tree through their kitchen, the road has a tree in it that's knocked out power for the entire street, our cousins are trapped at their grandmothers. None of that really compares the damage to my mother in law's next door to them. 3 trees fell in her yard, two of them landed on her roof ripping holes in it, one of them fell across the hood of her car damaging the body and smashing the wind shield. We were there til 11 helping them clean the trees off the car and roof.
And still, it's nothing compared to the damage to the park down the road, or the house that was split in 2. The entire town was shut down all day and people couldn't get into it or through it. Driving through fruitport, it looks like the aftermath of a hurricane, it honestly does, and I'm not sure how we're going to clean everything up.
All I can say is, we got lucky, my husband and I. Even our families are lucky. There was damage, but no one got hurt. There has been dozens of injuries and atleast one death fromt the storm that lasted all over 30 minutes.