My neighborhood, that is. At least that’s what people were saying it was. I haven’t heard an official report, and you know they’ll just cover it up like the aliens in New Mexico, anyway. But I think it was a microburst.
I was sitting in my third floor office, noticing with approval that it was raining a bit. God knows we need the rain (most of the country does), and we needed some cooling off. Then we got a couple of good cracks of thunder. Didn’t bother Captain Jack, but it made me jump. Then the wind started blowing and the house started shaking. I looked out the window and saw the big oak tree outside (just beyond our property line) whipping around, and I’m pretty sure I saw rain blowing horizontally. I was starting to think I should turn off the computer and get the hell downstairs to a more sheltered location. Being an idiot, I didn’t right away. Instead, I clicked weather.com to look at a radar map. By the time it came up, the storm was over. The map and my eyes both confirmed that the convective area was passing. It probably lasted two minutes, total.
When I went out a few minutes later with Captain Jack, I found the whole neighborhood out walking around. Our property was okay, but the neighborhood looked as if a hurricane had gone through. Here are a couple of pictures I snapped with my phone camera.
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| This one, around the block from my house, came down on the house across the street. Looked like it was being held up by the power and cable lines near the house. |
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| This grand old tree stood right outside our town’s new off-leash dog park. A brand-new maintenance shed in the dog park is gone altogether. This is just one of many trees that came down right across our bike path, where I do my rollerblading.
The force of nature is a powerful thing, isn’t it?
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