I subscribe to weather.com's text notification service for severe weather and received a notification at about 2:55pm that we were under a tornado warning. Always the skeptic, I opened the sliding glass door opening onto our back deck, which faces westerly. Everyone always talks about tornadoes sounding like a train, but I don't think so. I would describe the sound as a dull, continuous roar, like you might hear when blowing over the end of a small pipe, only louder. WORRRRRRRRRRRRRL. I retreated to the basement, where Melissa and the dogs were cleaning the basement bedroom, and went into my den and watched the weather unfolding. The tree tops began circling in wide arches like I have never seen before. When the rain blanked out the treeline some 150 feet away some time between 3:05 and 3:10 pm, I decided it was time to move to our "safe room". The safe room is a closet I built in the middle of the basement that is along the front wall, which is underground and the concrete wall that keeps it from pushing in because of the back being a walk-out at the south-western corner. I built the closet big enough for our family of 4 to hunker down in and Melissa, 3 dogs and I fit inside without too much crowding.
We were lucky in our subdivision overlooking the town. Only one building was hit by falling trees, the neighbor's garage on the downwind side of us. We had the top come out of the top of a large beech tree at the southern end of the house. It fell eastward, between the deck stairs and the shed about 20 feet away. It missed the fence's 4x4 post by mere inches, taking out just 4 boards.
In the garden on the northern end of the house, the plants did okay for the most part. All of the peppers were laid down, pointing at the house; most of them have erected themselves. The tomatoes fared the worst. They rubbed hard on their ties and some of them were broken off at the ground. Many of them have since caught the blight, I believe because of the stress of their wounds. The top snapped in one of the maple trees at the top edge of the garden, and is still hanging there. Another 50 feet or so and another had it's topmost branches stripped of all it's leaves and the ends of it's branches too. The oak tree, our best oak tree, on the downwind side of it was pushed over onto some smaller trees. It leaned there for over a week before coming the rest of the way down on the 9th of August. It is out of the frame, to the right and I missed getting a photo of it before it fell completely.
Power was out throughout much of the county due to numerous fallen trees and it was out on our road until Sunday around noon.
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