"Who hears these words of mine & puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, & the winds blew & beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine & does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, & the winds blew & beat against that house, & it fell with a great crash."

Matthew 7:24-27

Sunday, July 26, 2009

July 10th Storm

We got home from Minnesota on Thursday, July 9th, at about 8:00 at night.  We were awakened at 3:30 am Friday morning to our weather radio going off telling us we were under a severe thunderstorm warning.  Erik got up, turned it off and then went downstairs to go to the bathroom.  While he was down there, he decided to look at the radar to see the weather.  When he turned on the TV, the radar popped up and then the power went out.  He came back upstairs where Kyler and I were sleeping, got me up, and said he thought we should go to the basement because we had just lost power.  We grabbed Kyler out of his crib along with some flashlights and headed for the basement.  While we were sitting down there it was so loud!  I thought our windows were going to break, it was hailing so hard and the wind was so strong.  At one point I asked Erik if we still had windows because it sounded like it was hailing inside our house.  After a little while when things had calmed down, Erik decided to go upstairs and check things out.  He came back down and said that we had trees down but he couldn't see a lot because it was still dark outside.  After we thought the storm had passed we headed upstairs.  I couldn't believe what we saw outside, it was still hard to see because it was dark, but when the lightning came you could catch a glimpse of our yard.  I put Kyler in his swing and tried to go back to sleep downstairs in our spare room while Erik headed outside.  As it got light out it was crazy to see what had happened.  There were trees down everywhere on our street and you couldn't even drive down it.  All of our neighbors were out looking at the damage.

We then spent the next three days cleaning up our yard.  We have decided that we have the best neighbors, everyone was out helping everyone else out.  We have a neighbor a few houses down that works at Benton's, so he went and got a huge semi truck and we went up and down the street loading up all of the brush from our yards and he would take it out and dump it north of town.  By Sunday afternoon our yards were cleaned up, it was great!  However, we still didn't have power, we didn't get that back until Sunday night around 9:00 pm.  Take a look at the pictures below from our yard and neighborhood!

Our house before the storm last fall

Standing on the sidewalk outside our house looking south

Looking at our back yard

Looking at our house from across the street

Standing in our driveway looking at the street

Our front yard

Our front yard again

Our front yard and the semi we loaded up several times

Our back yard after we worked and cleared away brush

Our house now!

Our front yard now

Our front yard again

3 comments:

Jamie said...

That is horrible!! That tree was so pretty too. Glad that everyone is safe though. Did Kyler sleep through the whole thing??

Becky Bartlett said...

Wow! I didn't think about your place being right in the middle of it all. So sad to see all the damage... glad that you had some great neighbors and help with the clean up. And especially thankful that you all are okay!!

aeb said...

Yep he slept through the whole thing! We got him up and took him to the basement and he slept through all of that and the noise! Yet he doesn't like to sleep during the day... :)