|
Did I ever tell you about the time we were in a tornado? I'm going to now, like it or not, and only wish I had the knack of making my account as interesting as the experience was. Naturally it is still our main topic of conversation and all our plans for the future see to start "when we get the roof on" or "after the foundation is fixed."
First of all, let me say that we consider ourselves extremely fortunate to have been located where we are, to have had such sturdy house, and, not least of all, to have been protected by two garages and several sizable trees which took most of the flying debris. Of course, we are luckiest to have our family intact. We seem to have a mess with countless things damaged and lost, but have suffered nothing compared to those a block away and our damage is not even to be considered beside the loss of the Golden Ridge district.
The afternoon of the tornado, Mr went to Bismarck on business, planning to be gone until the following night. I spent most of the late day baking 4 batches of cookies and two cakes for the freezer. Thanks to my usual luck, it turned out to be one of the hottest days of the month and after standing by the hot oven for a few hours I was fit to be tied. Finally all the stuff was lined up, covering the counters under the window, cooling. It sprinkled off and on and I chased P down a couple times so she'd be findable in case rain really came before we were ready to eat, and also discussed the chances of an evening of bridge with some of the neighbors. Finally with the kids rounded up and our scrambled eggs on the table, we sat down and Paige began to chat about tornadoes and "Why does the world go around, Mommy?" The college boy next door had been telling her about "going around" and those explanations got me into such deep water that I never did find out where she'd heard talk about tornadoes. Found out later that it had already been sighted outside of town and warnings were up, so she'd evidently heard some of the neighbors discussing it. When she asked what we'd do if a tornado came, I said we'd just go down the basement to wait for the wind to quit, but she shouldn't worry as there aren't many tornadoes and I didn't think we'd ever have one. We didn't have the radio on then or later so never hear the warnings ourselves.
There got to be so much thunder at this point I had to go see what was brewing. Our collegiate friend next door was on the roof of their sun porch, inspecting the sky and I called "Is it gong to rain, Michael?" He said, "Up there." Me, laughing at my big joke, "Where's our tornado?" Michael, "Up there." Me. "Where?" Michael, "Up there." Me. "Ha, ha." The neighbor man from the other side then chimed in, "It's been sighted out by Casselton." Me, "I hope it didn't do any damage to the farms or crops." Whereupon they and all the other men on back stoops down the block went scuttling into their houses, and I went back to eggs and kids. The sky at this point was perfectly fascinating and I was loathe to leave the sight of it. There was a tremendous black cloud covering the western sky with an under-layer of white fluff. The black part was moving slowly towards us and the white portion was bubbling and boiling like nothing I've ever seen before. It was being sucked in from all four directions into the center, just as if a giant sat in the sky sucking clouds up a drinking straw just as fast as he could suck. This later turned out to be the top of the tornado.
By now, the radio had given warnings that everyone in Fargo should take cover as it was going to hit. I'll never forgive all those stupid men for not telling me it was really going to happen but I am grateful they gave me an inkling of what was going on.
A few minutes later the electricity went off and I told the kids that it often happens when there's an electrical storm. We ate eggs. Then the noise began, and in a very odd way, I though. It didn't start little and get big, it started big and got bigger and bigger. I ran for rugs and blankets and picked up C, teeterbabe and all, and told the other kids to come to the basement with me and no fooling around. I was yelling to get them to hear me. They got settled on the rugs with blankets wrapped around them over by the west wall by the stairs. Then I did a foolish thing. Instead of staying put I roared all over the house shutting windows, all of which seemed to be open. I couldn't remember if there were all supposed to be left open, shut, or just some open, so I shut them all figuring I would keep the rain out anyhow. Then I took more blankets down to the kids. Then, two more trips up to the kitchen, once to get C's food which was hot and I knew if she cried from hunger at this point she'd scare the other kids, and once more to get cookies for the big kids. I don't know how I knew there was that much time left to run around, unless the wind just wasn't blowing much then and I unconsciously realized it. I vaguely remember on my last trip past the back door hearing things blowing and hitting around. Next time, and Heaven forbid that there be a next time, I'll just sit tight. Then we got the blankets arranged well all around us and I warned the kids that I might put their heads under cover but not to worry. We then proceeded to have a tea party with me sweetly offering everyone another cooky one miniute and muttering, "Oh, my God," the next. We discovered afterwards that J sat on all her cookies. Things were flying by the window so fast, and I could hear glass shattering upstairs and bumps against the house. The sky outside looked white as snow and I could see green stuff and wood flying past the windows. After one last peek under the kids' blankets, where P was being a wonderful big girl with her arms wrapped around white-faced J and J's head squashed against her chest, I laid C across my lap and covered us up. I then though, "A person could get killed in a thing like this," which was the first time such an idea had occurred to me, and I made myself as tall sitting as possible and tried to hover over all the kids. Should have laid them flat with me on top but they couldn't have heard me yell by then. The noise was completely overpowering and I didn't think we could endure it any longer when suddenly our ears plugged from the pressure and a minute later, bang, they popped open again, and the noise receded much faster than it had built up. I uncovered the kids but, not knowing how tornadoes acted and fully expecting the nasty thing to turn around and chase us down again, I said we'd sit still for another few minutes cuz I was tired and would like to smoke a cigarette, which I did. I was shaking so I could hardly find my mouth but kept sputtering normal inanities to the kids. If they'd started crying I would gratefully have had a good case of hysterics myself.
We must have sat there about ten minutes before I dared venture out. The basement stairs were full of glass but the inside back door was intact and when I opened it I got the shock of my life. The only thing left of the storm door was the top piece of wood, which hung in from of my eyes by its chain. The yard was full of pieces of trees, flattened garbage cans, shingles, lumber, electric wires, glass, etc. Our nice apple tree was on the neighbors garage to the south. The children's slide, broken, was against the remains of the fence to the north, along with part of a garbage can. Two big birches at the back of the yard, the west side, had come down east into the yard. The garage doors had both been flung open and were twisted up and they were broken.. Everything went every direction. Even the garage was full of debris inside. There was also a few very large hailstones sprinkled on the ground.
The most amazing thing of all, seemed to me, were the sightseers. By the time we had emerged from the basement and reached the front outside, the streets were just packed with cars from the south side of town. We kept wondering where the police were and why they didn't come help out or least direct traffic. We found out later that they couldn't get in through the traffic jam. How all those people got here so fast, I can't imagine,
When we got out in front the funnel was still visible in the northeast and by then it was stretched out into a long white string that reached far into the sky.
I joined forces with some neighbors down a couple of houses, the wife with stringy wet hair and dressed in an old bathrobe, as she'd been in the shower. She led P and J and I with C and her bottle still in arms, we went into the next block to see what we could do as it was evident there was more damage there. Some of those houses were leveled and roofs, wall, etc., were laying all over the streets. Some of the home had one or two sides peeled off and the rest of the walls looked intact. Everyone was wandering around looking dazed and Sally and I alternated between tears and sweet sensible talk, again not to alarm the kids. At one place, which had been leveled to the foundation, the basement looked full of lumber but the two owners were still sitting down there, safe but too dazed and shocked to move.
When we got home again, almost all the neighbor men I know came by one by one to see if we were all right and what they could do to help. I kept expecting brother B to come to the rescue momentarily but it turned out he didn't know Mr was gone, so went home first to check on his family. They live on the south side and so escaped the thing. He had watched the whole tornado, from its formation at Casselton to its path through and out of town, all from the airport and he has an interesting tale to tell.
We packed off to B's for the night, all full of mud and dirt, and carrying half the things we needed. I grabbed aprons for the kids instead of sleepers. In the confusion we were lucky to have collected all the kids though. On the way we noticed there were trees blown down by the wind 16 or 18 blocks from here.
We got the much scraped off us all, most of which we acquired tramping around afterwards and some dirt which shook off the basement ceiling onto us, and fed the kids (even gave courageous little P a cherry in her coke) and go them off for the night, we thought. Poor P, who bore up so well during the wind, was plagued with nightmares and fears. She woke up at one point screaming that the exhaust fan made too much noise and she was afraid it would make it rain again. We had the television set on and she heard some stuff which she shouldn't have, so with one thing and another she was awake almost until I crawled in with her at 3 o'clock.
We put in emergency calls to a few people to let them know we were alright but didn't get through to Mr until 2 in the morning. He started getting radio reports in Bismarck about 8 o'clock and the first reports indicated that the tornado had n't been anywhere near us. It kept sounding worse hourly to him and finally places on every side of us were named as being damaged so he was mighty worried by the time be got through to him. If they'd gotten fuller reports earlier he'd have headed right home. Just as we got together on the phone, they announced on television that the US family was safe and Mr. in Bismarck needn't worry about them. The folks came rushing back in from the lake cottage where they'd gone late in the afternoon. They'd heard funny reports on radio and TV too and were pretty frantic by the time they reached town.
Friday Mr got back to town by noon and he and the folks and I came over here to start cleaning up. The sight was a shocker to those who hadn't seen it before and I'm afraid I ran around a little wildly, just giggling mostly, while everyone else worked. RMr gathered up all the yard and garage thing salvageable and he, Dad and some of the neighbors worked like troupers getting much of the debris gathered together. Our neighbors returned our apple tree and various items and we carried back what we found of theirs. B was going through the area with a chain saw from the office and helping cut trees apart where they had fallen as a traffic hazard or some such. He brought the saw over here and with its aid they made short order of our fallen trees and the bigger pieces of lumber which had flown in.
When we walked in the kitchen, there sat the remains of our scrambled eggs on the table and all my freezer baking spread out on the counter, all covered with a film of broken and pulverized glass. Mom cleaned most of that up. There were pieces of glass stuck straight into the walls and the floor linoleum was covered with glass ground fine as sand, much of which had to be scraped loose. It's been wiped up may times and I've steel-wooled it twice but we're still finding pieces of glass once in a while. Where it's still coming from I can't imagine. Most of the cookies we threw out but scraped the glass off the frosting of some and we've been eating out tornado cookies until just recently. There was also glass in the dining room which Dad started to clean up and which I'm still fighting. After I've vacuumed in there, the dust in the vacuum bag still glitters with ground glass. A piece of a branch and a lot of someone's roofing came through the dining room window, all through one small pane. We can't understand how so much mess could have come in one hole.
Friday we also got some temporary roofing put on and Rog took off all the broken windows and put the storm windows on, so we'd be more leak proof.
P and J went to the lake with the folks that night and Mr and I and C moved to their apartment in town. Before they left for the lake, we brought the kids over here to show them that we still had a home. P walked in and said, "Why, Mommy, it really is still our house." She had remembered such a mess that she though we didn't have anything left. Before the tornado hit, I had stripped her bed and hadn't gotten clean linens on yet. When she walked upstairs Friday, she started screaming and screaming, scared to death again. Finally I got out of here that she thought the "big wind" had torn her bed apart.
That night the rains came, and it just poured all through the next day. We were lucky in that our temporary covering held so we only had a little leakage. The ceilings in the den and our bedroom got a little wet and are peeling and it dripped a bit in C's room and the hallway, most of our leaks coming in around the vent pipes out the roof. It was clear we couldn't accomplish much in that weather but we did get the house put together a little inside and, with a little help from me and the lawn cart, Mr dragged trees and debris from in front of the garage when they'd been piled out to the front of the driveway so we could get the garage open and usable. He got soaked through three sets of pants and was wet through to the skin most of the afternoon. I spent only an hour or so outside and had to change every stitch I had on. We found the next day when Mr's raincoat had dried that it was literally covered with tiny fragments of glass and glittered like a lady's lame evening coat. If we have any bronchial trouble in the near future, we'll blame it on the ground glass we've breathed in. Our basement leaked like a sieve, thanks to the cracks and to the fact our rain gutter was missing.
Sunday it was nice weather for a change and Mr got a good deal more of the heavy cleanup work done and the garage doors banged together enough so they are usable and various other items taken care of to make the place liveable. I spent most of the day crawling on the lawn on my hands and knees, picking up glass, and I only got one side of the front done.
If anyone were to ask me what impressed me the most about this whole tornado business, first I'd say noise and then glass. We were unbelievably luck in our glass damage. There were 13 panes broken in all, but only 3 on the first floor of the house, 2 of them in the kitchen and 1 in the dining room. The other 10 were basement and garage. We have deep sympathy for our across-the-street neighbors, whose house fronts took the brunt. When their picture windows blew in, carpeting was ruined beyond repair and of course furniture was cut to pieces and wooden tables, etc., all have to be refinished. I don't know a soul across the way who doesn't have to have all their living room pieces reupholstered and refinished. Our three panes, all on the southwest corner of the house, threw glass even into the bathroom and den on the other corner and we've found it literally everywhere and in everything. The children and I would have been badly cut had we sat in the kitchen throughout the storm. The backwindow of a car parked in the driveway adjoining ours was pressured out onto that side of the lawn and I don't know how many housewindows we could make out of the pieces of window pane we have. This is no exaggeration and Mr will willingly back me up. We could pick up a piece of glass anyplace we put our hands down in the grass and then put our hand back in the same spot and feel one or two more pieces. Needless to say, our children do not go out of the house barefoot this summer and they've been duly cautioned against turning somersaults on the grass. I got them bathing shoes last weekend so they are able to play in the hose, etc. without getting cut. Rog says he'll roll the lawn this fall and hope that will drive the rest of the glass into the dirt.
The glaziers who came to repair last week just about put the top of the whole thing so far as I am concerned. After finally getting the glass cleaned out of the house enough so we felt safe barefoot inside and cutting my hands all up sifting through the glower beds, those idiots show up and proceed to knock out the remaining glass in the frames with a hammer and chisel. The kitchen and living room got messed up again of course and then, instead of taking the storm sash onto the driveway to knock it out, they splashed it all over the grass and flower beds, at the same time tramping down my few little plants that survived the storm. To clean that up, I just took the vacuum outside and vacuumed the lawn and garden. It sucked up a lot of dirt too but at least my fingers got no more wounds.
Sunday night following the tornado the power men got us fixed up so we really felt like we were living again. Being able to flick a switch and having a light flash on or stove heat up is wonderful when you've been without for awhile.
All the utility companies did a marvelous job during the emergency and all deserve medals to our way of thinking., Our electrical repair crew were an assorted group from 4 different towns. They got here about 9:30 at night and had been working since daybreak. The crews working on the main lines and those who were replacing downed poles worked round the clock for several days. One of our men who was from Grand Forks said that crews and trucks from their office were already on the way to Fargo to pitch in even before the storm actually hit us. The telephone men showed up shortly after the power fellows left. One of them came into the yard yelling, "Here's a yellow house." They'd found part of our leadin wire some distance away and had been looking for a yellow house whose paint would match that on the wire. We were the last house in to get telephone service and the rest had to wait several days before they could continue the lines down.
The Red Cross did a dandy job too. They moved in right away with help for the dispossessed, clothing for the unclothed, and food for everyone. They fed us a couple of meals from their mobile trucks which cruised the streets and we were mighty grateful. They had milk, coffee, cookies, sandwiches, and hot dishes, as much as anyone wanted. Last summer the children around here in midafternoon always used to come tearing home yelling, "Mom, there's the Joy Boy," and beg for nickels for ice cream. Tornado week they came home yelling, "Mom, here's the Red Cross," and then they'd roar back out carrying thermoses for coffee and bags for sandwiches and milk.
Martial law was declared right away from the governor and all the state enforcement agencies and the national guard moved in. For a week the only way anyone could get into the area was by showing our special police passes. Some looting and vandalism was reported the first night so they were taking no chances. Of course, people could sneak in on foot and that first Sunday there was really a parade. It was easy to spot the Sunday-dressed sightseers compared to us grubby homeowners. Here was a steady stream walking by our house and, although I felt like a fool crawling around the lawn at first, I got used to it and didn't even notice them after a time. Must be how caged animals get. The first couple days Mr only had to flash his pass through the car window but then they started stopping cars and checking descriptions, etc.
According to the newspaper map, we were in the funnel of the tornado but escaped more damage because the funnel had widened by the time it hit us which evidently abated some of its power. We are four houses from the corner and those right across the street were right in the dead center of it. Mr says 300 feet from us was the center. In the first half of the block the houses are either shells, leveled to the ground or else half the house is sliced off. The one right on the corner was a lovely big place and we've heard that it is to be bulldozed, the remains are, I should say. One place looks so silly. The yard and entrance walk look so inviting, lovely little evergreens planted beside the front entrance and flowers blooming away, but there's no house there, just part of a fireplace. Walking by the places with walls and roofs missing, we entertain ourselves by criticizing their interior decorating schemes. Such morbid entertainment. The big new Immanual Lutheran Church directly behind us is a total loss for I don't know how much money, and huge new Shanley High school and gym, both of brick, are called losses. When we see those heavily constructed buildings demolished we wonder how we survived. There is freak damage everywhere. Down in the next block from us one home, a large 2-story place with a very steeply pitched roof, still stands with houses on both sides of it flattened to the ground. Of course there isn't much left inside but the shell is standing.
The big rains compounded the damage over and over again. People who could have salvaged furniture and personal belonging lost everything when the water poured in. The flatroofed place across the street is a point. Their roofing and windows went in the wind and they would have been alright at that point. But after the rain, everything in the house except the back bedrooms was a loss. They had to drill holes inside through the ceiling and walls all over to let the water drain out. The sodden carpeting literally sloshed water over our shoes and all the furniture is warped and soaked. They are in the process of tearing out all the walls, partitions, cabinets, etc., and all the kitchen too. They have to get the shell dried out and then start over again. Of course people in the leveled homes who could have salvaged bits and snatches lost it all in the rain
Any pictures you may have seen of the Golden Ridge area didn't lie. Those homes aren't just knocked around a bit of full of holes like our area mostly is. The houses are just plain gone for several blocks and there's no indication where each home stood except for the concrete slabs. There were few basements in the area and it was there that all 10 people were killed and many were injured. In the ditches lay kitchen stoves bent right in two pieces and refrigerators with the doors pulled right off. You wonder how anything could have withstood that force, and not much did. For the last couple of weeks volunteer crews with heavy equipment and trucks have been just scraping all those remains together and burning it for fear the town would be infested with rodents and such attracted by the food spoilage and dead pests.
You hear of more freakish happenings all the time. Our one little freak is the inside liner of the refrigerator door, which cracked. It's plastic and Mr says the pressure must have made it pull in and it cracked in the process. Next door a piece of metal flew through the kitchen window, knocked the handle off the lid of a sugar bowl, leaving the lid on the bowl, and out the other window. Across the street one of their lovely glass antique lamps was undamaged except for the single piece of steel tubing which held the wire and was bent double. There was also a published picture of a home completely leveled except for a corner of the dining room where there stood a china cabinet all shining a full of undamaged dishes. A friend across the street had their daughter's formal hanging inside the door of her closet on one of those triangular things. They couldn't find that forma lanywhere until they started hunting for rain leaks in the attic. There was the formal, clean as could be but rumpled by its journey, all wrapped tightly round and round a vent pipe. The wind evidently sucked open the attic access hole, snatched the formal up and then nicely shut the door again.
As to our damage. Our worst trouble is in the basement or foundation where the south and west walls cracked and went outwards at the top, the south side most severely where there is quite an angle to it. Our contractor reassures us that this can be repaired by digging ditches down to the footings on both sides and then the concrete brick will supposedly fall back into place. What happens if it all falls the other way I won't guess. We assume he knows what he's talking about. He is in the process of locating labor to do the job which is a job in itself around here these days with workers having more jobs that they can manage. It will be a messy piece of work as the driveway and sidewalk go right beside the house and there will barely be room for a man to get down there to scoop out the dirt.
We have to have new roofing on both the garage and house and plan to get white shingles, as they have a good reputation for keeping the upstairs cooler in the summer.
I'll just semi-copy our insurance claim so I don't forget anything. It starts–Reshingle roof, patch roof boards and molding; Replace 60 feet of O.G. gutter; Repair exterior siding and trim (he said this was 50% replacement. The siding is full of holes from flying wood and glass and in some places foreign pieces of lumber are jammed in like plugs. Rog picked some nails out that stuck themselves into the side of the house, likewise big pieces of my friend Broken Glass); Repair screens, also 2 new screens with frame (we have only a very few screens that aren't full of hole); Replace combination door (the back storm door); Replace 13 panes glass; Paint exterior house and garage, new wood 2 coats, balance one coat; Fill cracks, fill marks in walls (dining and kitchen walls have little black pits from tarred roofing material which flew in and all the rooms are cracking); Paint 6 rooms; Dig trench around s. & w. wall of basement, straighten walls. Reinforce them with angle irons floor to ceiling. Point up cracks, waterproof etc., refill dirt and pack; replace knotty-pine finished plasterboard from basement lavatory (which Mr had to tear out as it molded when the basement flooded). Then the contractor's list on the garage–Reshingle roof; Replace tilt-up garage door; Straighten post between garage doors (This was pulled outwards at the bottom).
That was the contractor's list. We added–Reinstall electric service entrance able, repair rear entrance light fixture and repair exhaust fan door (This was in the kitchen, pulled open by wind and broken); Cleaning interior walls and floors (Part of this scrubbing I did and part we hired done. Insurance pays for all); Cleaning windows (for which insurance paid $20); Clean carpets; Clean draperies; Repair damaged section in rear chain-link fence (a long sort of community fence down in alley line. It is Sears' heaviest kind and was punctured in two places by flying lengths of 2 X 6); Replace cracked liner on refrigerator door and touch up scratches on outer case and door; Replace broken children's slide; Replace garbage can; Replace white vase( My big begonia jardinier); Replace scratched formica top of dining room table (This is full of black pits from roofing pebbles but I've steelwooled most of the discoloration off and we won't really replace it for now); Replace kitchen bread box (My nice new copper-fronted one which is dented.)
Insurance paid us for everything except for hauling away debris and cleaning the yard. Now we only hope that things don't cost more than the estimates.
We'll get our roof fixed right away and the basement fixed as soon as men are available for the work. All the outside painting will be done promptly too, I hope. The inside painting we'll probably leave until spring so the house can finish most of its cracking and the plaster won't open up again. There are all sorts of little things we keep working at and cleaning up all the time and we'll get squared away eventually. The irreparable thing we miss most is our poor apple tree which is sawed off at the ground. It's getting new shoots at the bottom which we are encouraging in hope of someday raising a new one.
We've been lucky to have children who are unafraid of electrical storms and wind but this whole business has taken its toll on them, good as they were during the actual tornado. And good they were too. We feel mighty proud of our brave indians. Form what we've heard, all the other neighborhood children spent their time in the basement screaming, crying, or shrieking prayers and clinging madly to their parents. I'll admit J did sit on her cookies, and P didn't eat much of hers, but they didn't panic a bit. Never a day goes by though without P bringing the tornado up. "What would have happened, Mommy, if we hadn't gone down to the basement?" "If our whole roof had blown off, would my bed be all wet at night?" "Where is Julie going to live now that her house is all blown away?" She gets excited over every drop of rain we get and listens intently to every forecast that's on when she's around. We had tornado warnings again last Tuesday and I though P would burst telling us about it. We turned on the radio right away and hear that warnings would last until midnight or whenever the front got past. We watched the cloud go past just south of town and were relived when it was gone, but evidently P couldn't realize it was safe then. When we went to cover them again at our bedtime, she sat right up and said, "Is it midnight yet?" I thought I'd be sick when I hear d those warnings. I think I'd collapse from terror if we had to really wait for one to hit again. We sure ran around telling people to turn on their radios that night. After coming to close to being unwarned myself, I wouldn't want it to happen to anyone else.
We're all developing what neighbor Sally calls "tourist's neck" which is a stiffness caused in that region by continually gazing into the western sky to inspect the clouds. This is an affliction we'll bear for sometime.
I'm still having daydreams and nightmares and "iffing" about the thing. One night when I was asleep Mr gave me a push in bed and I woke thinking I was a tree blown over and some men were rolling me over to saw the other side. Thoughts like what if I'd gone out to see what the noise was, been swept away, and the girls had followed, keep plaguing me.
This has gone on and on and I've described almost every breath we've taken I asked Mr if anyone would want to read all this junk. Hope you do and they never have occasion to write a similar letter.
Mr now tells me that I am wrong on a point, so I'd better correct myself. He says the storm did hit in this section with its full fury but we withstood it better simply because our whole area is better constructed. Consequently the individual homes held together better and there were fewer roofs and walls flying around to knock the next place to pieces. Tonight we took a ride through the whole "devastation area", my first since shortly after the tornado, and things look even more widespread and damaged than I had remembered. Reconstruction is going on at a great clip, all through the daylight hours. Some homes have already been almost completely rebuilt and others haven't even been touched. We drove through Golden Ridge and I now realize what Rog meant by the difference in construction. Since that area has been bulldozed and most of the debris burned and taken away, there is truly not a thing left to indicate the location of each former home except for a bare spot in the weeds. I think the newspaper said that around us the homes averaged in valued from $15 to $25,000, which everyone says is quite a gross under-estimation, and the Golden Ridge places were $3,000 to $4,000. Most of the places were just sitting on blocks, without even slabs beneath and there were very very few basements. Today one more person who had been injured in that area died, bringing the deaths to 11. She was an elderly lady who became paralyzed on one side and had to have one leg amputated because of her injuries.
Since starting this, I've done some more cleaning out of our flower beds and in them have found shingles of every color and description imaginable. We must have bits and snatches of a couple hundred homes scattered around the yard. Rog has also run across some scraps which obviously came from industrial buildings and those must have traveled many blocks to have arrived here.
We are in the midst of an electrical storm right at the minute, but it is blowing so hard that we had to shut all the windows and it isn't cooling us off much. We had 90 degree heat here for about a week (I should say 90 to 100 degrees), and are just about done in from it. It was in the 80's today but the humidity has ranged up to 77 percent so it is miserable. The air is thick enough to cut. The thunder has wakened the children, which it never used to do, and J tells us we ought to get to the basement and Paige says rocks will start hitting the house any minute. They are upstairs cowering in their beds at the moment and I hope they'll settle down soon. I've always been exhilarated by thunder storms and enjoyed every minute of them, but I feel uneasy now and just wish the thing would go away.
Enough is enough–I'll think of a million more things if I don't quickly send this off.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
