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We had a rather intense evening the night of April 13, 2006 due to a tornado. Iowa City's tornado siren sounded around 8:00 pm, so we switched our television to a news channel to see what the situation was. There were some tornadoes reported within about 40 miles of us, so we kept watching to see if there were further developments. Then an announcement came that a tornado had been spotted within about 6-10 miles of us, in Iowa City, so we headed for the basement. We turned on the television down there and kept watching. Suddenly the entire television screen went white, so we ran for the basement stairwell, which is the spot we had chosen for staying away from windows. (For those who don't know, one characteristic of tornadoes is that they generate some sort of electrical frequency that interferes with television signals and makes the screen go white as they approach if you have your tv on a certain channel.) As we huddled there, we heard the television come back to normal broadcast, then blank out again. Then it repeated this pattern. This was a very, VERY bad sign! And then all electrical power was lost. We covered ourselves with blankets (to protect us from flying debris), held hands, and hoped for the best. Starting about 8:30 pm we heard the roar. At first it sounded like continuous rumbling, like distant thunder, except louder. Then louder. Then louder. Then louder and our entire house started to shake. It felt like a California earthquake around magnitude 5.0, except that Iowa almost never gets earthquakes, and certainly not ones that big! The roar continued, the house continued to shake, and we started hearing crashing noises. It was impossible to tell what was causing them at the time, though in retrospect I think it was wind-blown debris smashing into the sides of our house and the cracks of falling trees. Eventually the roar started to fade as it receded. I immediately called my mom with my cell phone to tell her a tornado had just passed through but we were unharmed. Around 8:40 pm, we started to think about coming out of our stairwell. We turned on a radio that is powered by cranking it by hand to hear the latest news reports. At first, we heard about tornado warnings for some other cities that were a distance from us. Then the city tornado siren blasted, and the radio announced a second tornado warning for Iowa City. This one's path was predicted to hit Iowa City around 9:05 pm. So we stayed huddled in our stairwell, listening to the radio, reassuring our cats, wondering how badly damaged our house was but afraid to go look due to the new tornado warning. We stayed in that stairwell until the second tornado warning expired at 9:45 pm and the city siren blew an all-clear signal. We emerged from our stairwell and inspected the inside of our house. To our immense relief, everything seemed intact. So we went outside to see how the neighborhood had fared. Our only light was the full moon and people's flashlights. That's when we discovered that the tornado had come right up our street and hit every house on the opposite side of the street from us. Below are pictures taken the next morning of some of the damaged houses across the street from us. Some people were already up on their roofs nailing plastic sheeting or plywood over holes in their roofs. People were offering each other help: loaning ladders, offering spare beds to sleep in, etc. We were all too pumped full of adrenalin to go to bed. Even when there was nothing more to do in the dark, we kept talking to each other just to be around fellow human beings. The good news is that the damage to our house is minor - some damaged siding, a hole in the soffit, one broken window which was double-paned and only the outer pane broke so the inner one is still okay and therefore we're still protected from the weather. Several trees in our back yard fell, and our lawn is full of broken glass, insulation from other people's attics, and other debris. We finally have power restored to our house (which got done around 4 pm the day after the tornado). We count ourselves very, VERY lucky. We were without electricity from about 8:15 Thursday night until 4:00 pm Friday afternoon. I'm thankful we DID have plumbing, so at least we had working toilets! We also had dial tone on our telephone lines. These pictures were taken the day after the tornado on our street. It traveled along it from the bottom of the hill all the way to the top before veering off to the north. It severely damaged every house on the north side of our street, and did only light damage to the houses on the south side. (We were lucky to be on the south side.) This damage was to the house directly across the street from us. The photo was taken standing at the front door of our house. The garage, which is on the front of the house to the left, had its roof torn entirely off and the walls damaged:
The house next door to this one on the right looked okay when looking at it from our front door, but the entire porch on the back of the house was severely damaged and the furniture destroyed. This house was immediately to the left of the one in the above photo, so very close to being across the street from ours:
This photo shows the house immediately to the left of the above one. One of its upstairs bedrooms was destroyed:
Another neighbor's garage door was broken when someone else's sofa was blown into it. The sofa ended up in the garage. |
