This was the view from our front porch earlier today. According to the local news out of Little Rock, some areas had winds of “50 to 75 miles per hour or higher.”
Those specks in the air and that one horizontal blur are wind borne debris. Our yard is liberally littered with it.
Here’s another picture with more wind borne debris for comparison. And, yes, that is one of our trash cans blown over. Fortunately, everything stayed inside. One neighbor had some of his trash strewn quite a distance.
Karen was on her way home when this hit. She stopped down in town in a shopping center parking lot because the storm was so bad. She stayed there until the wind started picking up a metal carport that was for sale at the hardware store. She was afraid it would come down on our car, so she started trying to head home. Shortly after that, the wind and rain started to lessen.
We found out later that the metal carport landed on the car of one our neighbors, who owns a small business in the shopping center. The car was badly damaged.
Below is the road we normally take to get home. A tree had fallen across the power line and road before Karen tried to head home, so she had to try to take the “back way” home. Despite a tree down nearly all of the way across the road and a line that was sagging above our road, she made it.
We were fortunate. We lost one tree, several tree tops and quite a few branches, but didn’t have any structural damage and no injuries. Others around us had more severe storm damage. The place below had several large old trees lost. It didn’t look like the house was damaged, though.
Our power has been out for over 10 hours now. Fortunately, we have two generators. One is a small Honda gasoline powered generator, just large enough to power the refrigerator and a few small loads, though the lights go almost all the way out when the refrigerator cycles on. The other generator is in the motorhome, is diesel powered and has quite a bit more capacity. We’re running the Honda generator tonight, though.
Hopefully, we’ll have power back by morning. There were an estimated 40,000 Entergy customers without power earlier this evening, so who knows.
We planned to go to Little Rock tomorrow and probably still will.
Time to finish this, turn off the lights and reduce the loading on the generator.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m glad your and your wife weren’t hurt!
Jean,
Thanks! With all of the storm damage in the state, I didn’t hear of anyone getting hurt.
When I first stopped by, I thought, look at those lovely, moody, misty photographs. Then I read the text. Scary! I’ve never been in a storm like that. I’m glad everything’s safe for you and Karen.
Dot – It got so bad for a while that I retreated into the house. I thought for sure it was a tornado. The winds, though, were higher than I’ve ever seen before.