originally written yesterday

Is it just me, or has it seemed like it's been raining every day in Chicago? Every day there's rain, every other day there's a thunderstorm. A couple weeks ago, we left a bucket out on our deck, and the thing is almost full.

So today (or whenever I get a chance to post this up since currently I have no power but I have to leave my laptop on to recharge my phone) I was working on getting a presentation ready. Dave had the day off (did I mention it's our anniversary today?) and he had taken Ben to the pool since it was a nice, warm day. I had the house all to myself.

I was IM'ing with my coworker, trying to work out issues and throw ideas back and forth. We went on a little bit of a tangent and started talking about hazard, flood, and other types of insurance needed for homes, since he's in the process of buying a home. He's in Texas, and will slightly be affected by Hurricane Dean. He mentioned "windstorm" insurance, which is just a fancy word for hurricane. I mentioned that here we usually have floods and things like that. I wondered to myself if we had any sort of "windstorm"-type insurance for tornadoes.

Not 10 minutes later, my television (which I always keep on for background noise, and I was actually half paying attention to the move "The Remains of the Day") had started beeping, going to a blue screen with just text on it. It flashed, "Tornado Warning!" I was trying to read the text as an announcer started talking. At the same time, the home phone rang. It was Dave, telling me that a tornado had been spotted nearby. He told me to stay down in the basement. I hung up and tried to listen to the rest of the announcement - it had mentioned the suburbs right next to us and didn't know if they had mentioned my suburb. I listened a little more, and the announcer said, "A funnel has been spotted. The tornado will be hitting at 3:20". Unfortunately, I didn't have my watch on. I grabbed my phone - the time was 3:16. Four minutes!

I made a mad dash around the house, bringing down my laptop, house phone, cell phone, candles, lighter and flashlight first into the basement. I looked outside the window, and it had just started raining. I then ran up to the second floor and grabbed my backup CD's of pictures, box of Benjamin memorabilia, several mini videocassettes - included the day of Ben's birth, Claudine's raw wedding footage and any other tapes I could get my hands on. I also grabbed some batteries for the flashlight, which I had noticed was getting dim.

I went into the back corner of the basement, behind the bar, and arranged all my stuff. As soon as I sat down, the power went out. I lit my candles around me and waited. I could hear the rain start to hit the house pretty hard, and the thunder got louder and louder. I tried to listen for that "roaring train" sound, but it never came. I twiddled around for a bit, read a bit of the sketch books that I got from the convention, and waited. Still nothing.

I snuck upstairs to see what was going on. There were still cars passing by the house (I'm on a busy street) and none of them seemed like they were in a panic. So I opened the front door to look outside. I realized it was pretty windy out there and had a bit of difficulty closing the screen door because of the wind. I ran back downstairs.

After another couple minutes, I decided to come back up again. I went outside this time, and looked around and saw no funnel cloud. The rain had slowed down to a little drizzle. I looked into the sky again and there was a huge flash of lightning, very close. I went back inside the house.

Updated this morning

I didn't bother going back downstairs, thinking that the time had probably passed for the tornado warning. I searched for a screwdriver to open up my flashlight (it's a child's hippo flashlight) and I found our other "real" flashlight. I changed the batteries, and then went downstairs and took a nap on the couch.

Dave called a little later and I realized it was getting dark. I went up to pack some clothes, deciding that we'd just stay at his in-laws for the night, so I could get some work done and we could have some electricity. He came to pick me up and said that it took him FOREVER to get home since so many traffic lights were out on the major roads, and there was a lot of flooding on the streets.

We checked the basement to make sure there was no flooding and left. Luckily, we took another route that didn't have as many inactive traffic lights, but it still took a while to get over to the in-laws. Once we got there, Dave went into their basement and saw that there was water seeping in. They worked on cleaning up the water and I started to get ready for my presentation.

The news gave a ton of reports of uprooted trees, whose root systems were weak because of all the saturated water. No tornados touched down, but there was plenty of flooding and power outages - 320,000 of my fellow Chicagoans were out of power as well. They mentioned that it could take DAYS to restore power to everyone!

I heard a phone call in the middle of the night, turns out it was Dave's brother saying that he was experiencing some water damage at his place. I went back to sleep, but woke again when Dave's father said that he had gone to check on our place and we had some flooding in the basement. Nothing major, but about an inch of water. I thought of all the stuff we have stored in the basement (my comic books!) and got up at 5:30 to head back home and assess the damage.

Dave's dad and I headed home, and the power was still out. I headed into the basement and saw that Dave's dad had already done damage control. The furniture was raised up on cans of food, stuff was put on the pool table, and the barstools were placed on the bar. We went into the closet to move out our snowboards, comic books and other boxes we had in there. One of my boxes of comics was heavily saturated with water, but luckily all the books in there were bagged in plastic. The only casualty was a trade paperback of Ultimate Spiderman.

We did a quick stop by Home Depot afterwards to see if we could find a generator, but it turns out that they were sold out of them at around 6:15 this morning. Crazy!

So here I am, at my in-laws, getting ready to get some work done and waiting for the next set of storms to come in this afternoon. Hoepfully it doesn't cause any more flooding. Keep your fingers crossed!

Posted by Yano at August 24, 2007 09:44 AM

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