Mother Nature Does Her Thing (Again)

On Friday, September 5, Jim & I were planning to meet friends at the Kalamazoo Art Hop, browse a bit, and go out for pizza. Rain and storms were predicted, but it was holding off when we entered the Park Trade Center. We looked west - toward our home - and the sky was very very dark. We figured the rain had arrived there.

A few minutes later, we started getting texts from our friends. Power was out. Trees were down. And soon, we could look out the window and see pouring rain.

We headed home, and discovered that our neighborhood had been damaged as well. Amazingly, our trees suffered minimal damage, but we found branches from other trees in our yard. We later discovered that our maple had one branch that had split, but not fallen (we're still waiting for the tree service to come take care of that).

We were lucky - Karen and John's tree had taken out our AT&T line back in August. That same tree was damaged in this storm, and two huge limbs landed in our yard, but this time, our AT&T line remained intact. There were lots of power outages, however, including our neighborhood.

Jerry & Rose, our neighbors to the north, had a hole in their attic wall. They had retreated to the basement, and heard a horrible crack. A tree had come down on the power line to their house, and as the line came down, it pulled off a section of their wall.

Apparently the damage was caused not by a tornado, but rather by straight-line winds. Jim and I commiserated with our neighbors, turned on our battery-powered radio, and settled in the front room with books and flashlights. Bonnie tried to figure out this new game plan.

The next day, we worked on dragging branches to the street, and cleaning up in general. The power company was out in force, including not just Consumers Power, but other companies as well. At one point, there were at least six trucks clustered around our intersection! Happily, our power came back around 1 pm on Saturday afternoon. Sometime the next week, city crews came by and cleaned up all the branches piled along the street.

Here are some photos. These first are from Friday night:

Kitty-corner to our house

Rose & Jerry's house - you can just see
the hole in their attic

This was at a house west of us;
the tree snapped below the ground!

Limbs from John & Karen's tree.
They took out our obsolete cable line

I saw this downed pole on Saturday morning, coming home from the Farmers Market:

At the corner of Drake and Sunnydale

Bonnie and I walked through the park, and the Friendship Village Woods, on Sunday morning. Nothing had been cleaned up there yet:

Frey's Park

Bonnie was amazed to find leaf smells at ground level

Frey's Park

This used to be a path in Friendship Village. Oops.

Continuing our walk through the neighborhood, debris lined the streets:

On Croyden, next to the school;
those roots were taller than me

Along Piccadilly

Along Piccadilly

Another shot of Rose & Jerry's house

Piccadilly

This is the area where the phone pole was down - apparently there were two poles down in that area, since this is further in from Drake:

On Sunnydale, looking toward Drake

Some lines still down here

What a mess!

In spite of the storm, some things continued to thrive:

Friendship Village

Friendship Village

Along Piccadilly

And of course, Bonnie thrives anytime there's a walk involved!

Trying out the new
sidewalk along Drake