If 2020 hasn't given us enough problems with the worldwide pandemic, we've had a couple of weather issues this year that have completely knocked us for a loop. In April, a hail storm damaged hundreds of houses in the Quad Cities - some are still getting new roofs, siding and gutters from that event. But on Monday, something even more destructive that affected millions of people from Nebraska to Indiana occurred - a rare derecho storm that started early in the morning and pushed across the Midwest throughout the day. The above picture is an hour-by-hour timeline of the storm as it made its way from eastern Nebraska into western Ohio. (Photo courtesy National Weather Service)
As I said, back in April we had a hail storm that blew through on what had started out as a beautiful early Spring evening with a full moon rising out of the southeast sky. This was after the first day we had hit 80° degrees (F) in 2020. Storms had developed to the northwest of the Quad Cities and a series of severe thunderstorm warnings were issued. With one storm that was approaching the area, the National Weather Service predicted that it would slide to the north and east of where we lived. My wife and I sat out in front of our house watching the storm gain intensity. The cloud-to-cloud lightning was intense and we continued to think that it was going to go past us. Then we noticed that the lightning was directly above us and scattered large drops of rain began to hit the pavement. We went inside, down to our family room and turned on a movie.
As we were watching the movie, about 15 minutes in I thought I heard something like a set of keys or some rocks that had been accidentally left in a pocket of a pair of pants that were in the dryer. The only problem was that our dryer wasn't on. When I finally realized that it was probably hail, we ran upstairs and looked out our backdoor into our yard in time to see golf-ball sized hailstones pelting our house, my car, our trees, our deck, etc.
We were lucky, however. We had just had a new roof put on about a year and a half prior and it suffered minimal damage because we had A) paid through the nose for high-quality shingles; and B) used a high-quality roofing company to do the work. The only damage were to some cap shingles and the gutters. Compared to neighbors up and down our street and behind us who had massive roof and siding damage, we got off pretty easy.
But, the weather in the spring was certainly fickle. Four days after we had the hail storm, we had 3 inches of snow. In mid-April. And three days after that, we got 3 more inches of snow. Granted, most of the snow was melted by noon those two days, but still... It's mid-April! There's supposed to be daffodils, tulips, green grass, and trees starting to bud. Combined with no baseball starting up due to all the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a bummer of an April.
May wasn't much better. There was a stretch in mid-May - including our 25th wedding anniversary - where we didn't see the sun or temperatures higher than 57° (F) over a six day period. I half-jokingly asked my friends on Facebook if a person could get Seasonal Affective Disorder in the spring. (One of my friends who is a nurse replied with an emphatic "YES, YOU CAN!")
June came and the summer months have been very nice. There's been no outdoor events this year thanks to the pandemic, so there's been a lot of hanging with the neighbors and sitting on our deck enjoying the weather. We really haven't had any large weather to speak of other than a spell of hot and humid weather - which, to me, is wonderful.
We had been hearing over the previous weekend about the chance of storms coming through on Monday afternoon. By Monday morning, local television meteorologists were warning that storms would gain strength across the state of Iowa with a heightened risk of strong to severe storms occurring that afternoon.
The first thing I heard of the impact of the storm was on Monday morning from a friend in Nebraska whose work van took a direct hit from a tree that fell into it. He wasn't inside, thank god. But it thoroughly ruined his Monday.
Then a couple hours later I started getting reports of the storm impacting parts of Des Moines and central Iowa. Ames was hit pretty hard, but then reports of heavy damage in Marshalltown (where winds hit nearly 100 mph) and in Newton started to come in on social media. The Cellar Peanut Pub in Newton (click here to see the Road Tips entry on the Cellar Peanut Pub) lost part of their wall and their roof in the storm. (Photo above right courtesy Cellar Peanut Pub - Newton Facebook page.)
Suddenly, reports started coming in from Cedar Rapids where wind speeds of over 100 mph had wreaked havoc on the city. Now, my father-in-law has a farmstead south and east of Cedar Rapids and I had called him earlier in the morning to wish him happy birthday - it was his 80th birthday. He said that he and his lady friend were heading out from her house in North Liberty to the farm to do some work. I told him that I had heard some storms were supposed to come in sometime in the afternoon. He said that he had heard we may get some rain, but he didn't know about any storms.
When my wife - who grew up in Cedar Rapids - found out that the city was getting pummeled, she called her father out at his farm. She asked what he was doing and he said that they were about ready to go get into the car and get out of there. "Where you going to go," she asked him.
He thought about it for a moment and said, "Well, I really don't know. Back to North Liberty, I guess."
By the time he had gotten off the phone and almost opened the door to go outside, a massive gust of wind knocked one of his maple trees onto his car, making it inoperable. It was an old Buick and I was talking to him about it the next day and he was more upset that he wasn't going to be able to get 300,000 miles on the car. "It had a great engine," he said. "I would have been able to get 300,000 on it easily. Now they'll probably just total it." My wife was thankful that she made the phone call because, as she pointed out, they probably would have been either inside the car or just outside the car when the tree hit it.
Following the storm on National Weather Service radar, as well as on local television which had broken in with on-going weather bulletins, we figured the storm would hit the Quad Cities around 1:30 p.m. That allowed me to go outside and bring in both our American and Hawaiian flags, our hanging baskets, secure larger pots up close to the house, take in our umbrella, and make sure our garden peppers and tomatoes were tied up.
It came quick. We were watching one of the local stations that had a downtown Davenport tower camera as the front line of wind gusts emanating from a line of very dark clouds lined up in west Davenport and started to blow dust across the site of the former Kraft Foods plant just west of downtown Davenport. The dust cloud enveloped the north end of the Centennial Bridge connecting Davenport with Rock Island and soon inundated LeClaire Park. It was less than two minutes later when the first gusts hit our house.
We were experiencing a derecho - a rare meteorological event that features a line of fast moving severe storms that can go for hundreds of miles and stretch over 100 miles in length from top to bottom. Wind speeds usually sustain around 40 to 50 mph with gusts approaching - and easily surpassing - hurricane strength at times. The wind damage usually occurs in just one direction and is usually known as "straight-line winds". A derecho (de-RAY-cho) can stay together for long periods of time (as shown in the time-line picture at the top of this post) and their strong winds can last for much longer periods than a normal severe thunderstorm. We had a derecho in the Quad Cities about 14 or 15 years ago, but this one was much stronger and lasted much, much longer.
For the next 45 minutes, I have to tell you - I have never been in a storm where the sustained winds were so high for so long. Mixed in with the high sustained winds over that period of time that were well over 40 mph were 8 or 9 gusts that clocked as high as 89 mph at the Davenport airport. I have to tell you - and I don't mind saying so - there were at least 3 times when I was scared, as in "Holy shit!" scared.
We never did go down to our basement - probably a stupid thing. But it also hearkens back to when I was a little kid and we would sometimes sit outside watching the approaching storm come with a wall of rain racing over the fields west of our house. I can remember sitting on the roof on a handful of occasions watching storms come in when I was younger. Of course, I also rode a bike while not wearing a helmet, drank directly out of the water hose, and never wore a seat belt - especially in the back of pick-up trucks. Kids these days don't know how much fun there is in dangerous situations.
The wind blew branches, leaves, garbage bins, roofing material and whatever else down the street and across yards from west to east. Our power went out at 1:46 p.m. and we figured that it would be out for quite sometime. I would go to the front door and open it up from time to time to look out. Then a gust from hell would come through whipping the trees back and forth. I would immediately shut the door and back away into the center of the house.
We heard a huge "whomp!" not long into the initial throes of the storm. A large limb from our neighbor's large maple tree fell on our power line. The power line stayed intact, but the tension guide wire that supported the power wires from the transformer pole to our house had snapped. Thankfully, the limb soon dropped to the ground and no other large limb hit the wire. The maple tree in our neighbor's yard has been a point of concern for us for a number of years as it's A) over 60 years old, and B) hangs over a significant portion of our house and deck. I have to say that if Monday's storm didn't bring it down, nothing ever will. (Of course, watch it collapse or drop a huge limb on a sunny day with light winds.)
(UPDATE - We had reported the broken tension wire to MidAmerican Energy after the storm, and the following Sunday evening a team of power contractors came by the house to fix the wire. We were having problems in our house with lights flickering - getting more dim or getting very bright - especially when something like a hair dryer or the washing machine would kick on. It turned out that the tension guide wire tore out the ground going into our house. Once these guys - who were from Colorado and were helping out the local power company - got it fixed, it seemed to fix the dimming and surge problems.)
I've been in two tropical storms in my lifetime - once in Houston in 1985 and once in New Orleans in 1998. The winds were nowhere as intense as the winds we experienced on Monday. Many people in the Midwest who have gone through a hurricane said Monday's derecho equaled the experience they had previously. The storm was also sort of weird. Lots of wind, but not a lot of rain. A lot of the rain was coming down horizontally and I'm guessing a lot of it didn't make it into our rain gauge. Our gauge showed only .15 of an inch of rain, but the yard and soil in our garden seemed to show that there was more than that.
And the temperature dropped significantly. Just before the storm hit, our thermometer showed that it was 91° (F). After the storm had gone through, the temperature stood at 63° (F). That's a pretty strong cold front that came through.About an hour after the storm passed, I was able to get outside as I felt the winds had died down enough for me to survey the damage. Quite frankly, other than a few bigger limbs that were pretty easy to drag to the curb, we didn't have much other than a bunch of leaves and twigs in our yard. It took my wife and I about 30 to 45 minutes of total clean up. And what we didn't get picked up, I figured that I'd our vacuum/mow the lawn to pick up the rest of it. I picked up tree branches with leaves from five different types of trees on our front yard - none of them from either our linden tree or the crab apple tree. In fact, both the trees on our property came through with flying colors and little to no damage.
Our other neighbors around us seemed to be as lucky as we were. We did have some trees down in the neighborhood including just down the block to the west of us. We know a guy just down the street from us who had a tree snap off at ground level that landed on his front yard. Except, it originally stood between the sidewalk and the street. "Not my problem," he said with a shrug when we saw him later on. "The city will take care of it." Most of the yard debris around our immediate neighborhood consisted of leaves, small branches and some naked twigs.
We can't say that for a handful of trees in our full neighborhood. My wife and I ventured out - as authorities said not to do after the storm - to survey areas in the blocks surrounding our home. Friends behind us lost some of their fencing. The neighbors next door had their garage door pushed in by the wind and knocked off the track, but they were able to open it up manually. A neighbor about a half block away had a smaller tree come down on his garage. But the tree was in such bad shape that it literally exploded when it hit the roof and the damage to his house was minimal. A neighbor to the north had a large tree come down on their above ground pool and part of their house. We saw a lot of tree damage, but not a lot of damage to dwellings. Of course, no one had power.
We figured that if we didn't open the doors on our two refrigerators, we could probably get by with not worrying about the food inside the fridge for about 18 hours and up to 48 hours with the freezer. Ice was nowhere to be found - at least when we finally thought about it and the few grocery stores/convenience stores that were open had already been stripped bare by people who had similar ideas, but were much more quick at the switch. I laid in bed that night in a house with no electricity - which meant no air-conditioning or even fans - worrying about the food.
The next morning, something woke me up around 6 a.m. It was the hum of a small motor. My wife had moved to our spare bedroom as she was having trouble sleeping and it woke her up, too. I threw on a t-shirt and a pair of shorts and went to look out our front door. Our next door neighbor had his industrial-sized generator - a 5000-watt loud-assed beauty that he started up moments before. It was a beautiful morning and I went outside to take a look at the yard after we had cleaned it up the day before.
I saw that he had two drop cords plugged into the generator - no doubt from their house refrigerator and their garage refrigerator. They had a phone charger plugged into the third outlet and the fourth outlet was empty. He also had a high-voltage input for air conditioners or ovens, but I doubt if he would use that as the weather had turned very nice with low humidity after the storm.
My neighbor came around the corner of his garage and he said, "Hey, if you have a drop cord that will reach, you can plug your refrigerator in your garage into the generator." Well, he didn't have to offer twice. I mean, we're talking about the infamous "beer fridge" that also is our main freezer. I grabbed a 100-foot extension cord and ran it out from the garage to the generator. He plugged it into the generator and I plugged in the power cord from the fridge into the extension cord. The refrigerator jumped to life.
My wife groggily came out into the kitchen when I got back into the house. "How rude," she said half-jokingly about the sound of the generator next door.
I said, "Well, that rude sound is saving our food and beer in the garage."
She said, "Can he do the one in the house?"
I walked back outside and he came up to me and said, "Hey, when we're done charging our phones, I'll have another outlet open. If you have another drop cord, we can hook up your house fridge." I had to connect a 50 footer and a 25 footer together to make it work, but when he plugged it into the generator, our house fridge popped on effortlessly.
With that worry out of the way for awhile, we started to reach out to family members. The only problem was that cellular service was so sporadic - I understand that one-third of all cell towers across the state of Iowa were damaged in the storm - and calls and texts didn't make it to their intended targets. I had sent a text to a couple three people at my work saying that we had no power, no internet, and "iffy" cellular coverage and that I would have no way to work at home that day. My wife - who has been working from home since April - was pretty much in the same boat.
It turned out that her uncle - her dad's brother - and her son were going to go out to her dad's farm and help cut up the tree that killed his car. We started to get stuff together to head up there and we took off around 11 a.m. About 30 miles outside of Davenport on our way to his farm, my wife got a text message from her son. "Ohp! Change of plans," she said. The text from her son said that they were pretty much done out at the farm and were heading into Cedar Rapids to help clear debris from her sister's yard. "We're going to Cedar Rapids now," she said as more of a command than a statement.
When we got near Cedar Rapids we began to see the scope of the damage. Between the Cedar Rapids airport exit and the U.S. Highway 30 exit, we counted 7 semi's that were on their sides, blown over from the high winds the day before. It was quite the sight.
Getting into Cedar Rapids, we were astonished and horrified at the amount of tree damage suffered in the city. Trees had been uprooted, large branches were laying on roadways, trunks of tree were twisted and shorn of bark, and power lines were hanging dangerously along sidewalks and low over roadways. I had never seen so much damage to trees that didn't involve a tornado in my life.
My wife's sister lives just west of downtown Cedar Rapids and we turned down her street and were horrified at what we saw. The amount of destruction was amazing. It was certainly astonishing to see. Wind gusts in the area around the city climbed to 112 mph - good enough for what would be classified as a Category 3 hurricane.
My wife's dad was "supervising" his brother and Cindy's son as they used chain saws to cut up the larger tree that had fallen on my sister-in-law's yard. It turned out I was a much needed extra hand to help move some of the larger chunks of wood to the side of the yard near the street. My wife, my sister-in-law, and their cousin from the Twin Cities who came down from NE Iowa with my wife's uncle and aunt to help out all grabbed rakes to take care of the leaves and small branches in the yard.
It was a beautiful day - much nicer than the day before at the same time of the storm was slamming into Cedar Rapids. We actually made pretty short work of most of the debris in her yard - I think it took us a little less than two hours to get much of the debris close to the street. My father-in-law was concerned that we were covering the sidewalk in some places and I had to assure him that the city of Cedar Rapids probably viewed this episode as a special situation and would probably waive any considerations of citing my sister-in-law for having debris on her sidewalk. In fact, my wife pointed out other neighbors up and down the street that had debris on the sidewalks in front of their homes to my father-in-law. "Don't worry, Dad," she assured him. "She's not going to get a ticket from the city on this one."
Next to my sister-in-law's house was a large tree that had slammed into the garage in back. If you click on the photo on the above right, you may be able to see a light grey vehicle that was parked in the garage. It turned out that the former family had outgrown the house and moved to a larger property. The father of the lady who lived there had his Chevrolet Traverse stored in there. When the property was sold to a young lady, the man who stored the Traverse in the garage came up with a proposition to the new owner - allow me to continue to store my Traverse in the garage and I'll mow your lawn for you at no charge. The new owner was like, "Well, duh! Yeah!"
After I was told that story by my sister-in-law, I said, "Well, how did that work out for him?!" It was going to be interesting how they were going to get the tree off the garage and the Equinox extracted from the garage without it collapsing on top of the vehicle.
(UPDATE - It turned out that more of the garage collapsed on the Traverse and it was declared as totaled by the insurance company. The man told my sister-in-law that it only had 8000 miles on it. Not only was his vehicle crushed, but the man was emotionally crushed that he lost his Traverse.)
We took off to go back home a bit after 3 p.m. and the interstate out of Cedar Rapids was a rush-hour mess with cars and trucks only able to go about 20 mph out of town due to the number of overturned trucks still on the side of the road. My wife suggested taking the airport exit and making our way east, then south to get to Interstate 80 near Iowa City. Along the way, we were amazed by the number of cornfields where the corn stalks were just flattened. It is estimated that 10 million acres of farmland was heavily damaged across the state and that corn yields this year will be half of what was expected.
In fact, the damage to cornfields was so severe that you could see it from space. The wispy white blotches you see from west central Iowa into the eastern part of the state are cornfields that were blown over during the derecho.
We got back home around 5 p.m. and our power was still not on. Behind our neighbor's house is the large transformer that serves a number of houses in the area. A large branch had fallen from our neighbor's maple tree onto the main wire near the transformer during the storm and there had been repeated attempts to contact MidAmerican Energy to tell them about the branch. Between four or five neighbors in the area, we hoped that at least one of us was able to circumnavigate the website on our phones that continued to have sporadic service as the toll free number to report outages was busy every time one of us would call. I figured that as long as that branch was up there, we wouldn't have power.
At the height of the outage, over 111,000 customers in the greater Quad Cities area were without power. I was able to finally get through via phone on Tuesday night to MidAmerican and an automated message said that there were still over 25,000 outages on the Iowa side of the river including over 1500 in our immediate area. But it never did allow me to let them know that we had a limb on the main line behind our neighbor's house.
To give you a perspective of what it looked like a night after the storm, the above photos are a before and after satellite view of central and eastern Iowa (the Quad Cities are just out of the frame on the right) showing the widespread power outages suffered across the state. When the August 11 picture was taken, you can see that Cedar Rapids was nearly all dark. And while Des Moines appeared to be well lit, they still had over 70,000 customers without power. (Photo courtesy KCRG/NASA Worldview)
The one saving grace through all of this - we had water. And we have a gas water heater. After working hard moving debris in Cedar Rapids earlier in the day, a long, hot shower felt damned good just before we went to bed. Plus it helped keep us cool on another night of no air conditioning or even being able to use a fan to blow some air around.
Later that evening, something woke me up. Lights had come back on in our house! The television in the bedroom was recycling through the DirecTV box startup menu. I looked at the clock and it said 10:57. I sort of tapped my wife on the leg and I said, "Power!" She threw the covers over her head and didn't move a muscle. That was her way of telling me, "You deal with it!"
I got out of bed, threw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and proceeded to try to get things back to normal. That included turning off lights, resetting clocks, turning off the TV on our four-season porch, and - most importantly - plugging our refrigerators back into the wall. Our neighbor had shut off the generator earlier in the evening because I'm sure the neighborhood wouldn't want to hear that thing going all night long. I got the fridge in the kitchen plugged back in and went out to the garage and got that one plugged back in. I gathered up our drop cords that were outside and took them into the garage.
Then I went into the office to check my computer. That's when I discovered the internet was working fine and dandy in conjunction with the power coming back on. And I had a bunch of e-mails that I knew I would need to return first thing in the morning. But the first thing I did was go to the MidAmerican Energy web site and report the branch on the power line. I guess that having a large branch on the line like that doesn't matter.
But the best thing is that I also had to shut all our open windows as the air-conditioner and ceiling fans were also working. After being up for about 45 minutes trying to get everything back to normal in the house, I crawled back into bed listening to the hum of our HVAC unit outside our bedroom window. My wife was more than happy that the AC was back on.
As I finish this up entry on Thursday evening - three-plus days after the derecho hit - there are still over 25,000 houses and businesses across the Quad Cities that still do not have power. In highly affected places like Des Moines, Newton, Marshalltown and Cedar Rapids, they may not have power until this weekend, at the earliest. There are a number of rural customers who may not have power until early next week. But we were certainly lucky. We had helping neighbors with a generator, we had minimal damage to trees and personal property at our place, and we have power when many others do not.
But the hell of it is - the large tree branch is still on the main power line behind our neighbor's house...
(UPDATE - A tree company working in conjunction with Mid-American Energy was able to get the branch down about five days after the storm hit. Turned out that it didn't matter if a tree branch was on the line for power to continue on to houses in our neighborhood.)
(UPDATE 8-29-20) Since we had power less than two days after the storm hit and my sister-in-law in Cedar Rapids did not, we invited her to stay with us for a few days. She also works from home and needs an internet connection - which wasn't going to happen until well after she got power back on. Those few days have stretched into two weeks. She got power back on in her house a little over a week ago, but there's still no internet connection from her cable company. She said that she would hear from the cable company when they would be working in her neighborhood, but would not know for sure if her internet would be up and running until she went back to try it. But it turns out that the extensive damage in Cedar Rapids could cause cable and internet access to be delayed a little longer than expected. But we're fine with her here. We now have three people working out of the house and no one seems to be getting in each other's way.
My sister-in-law went home to Cedar Rapids on Friday night to hang for a couple days and she told my wife on Saturday morning that she was depressed because it's been nearly 3 weeks since the storm and she still has piles upon piles of debris from the fallen trees in front of her house.)
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