Our first day without Rebecca and Aubrey…a tornado

With the abundance of severe weather in the midwest it seems that a lot of people know what it’s like to sit through a tornado. It can be a vastly different experience depending on what shelter you have and the intensity of the tornado. Before I describe Ella and my experience last Sunday, I just want to offer my sincerest sympathies and prayers to those who’ve experience loss as part of the tornadoes in Joplin, MO. If you so desire you can give to the American Red Cross to help out with the recovery. You can also still help out those in North Minneapolis (many of whom still need basic necessities) through Urban Homeworks (an organization that intimately knows the needs of North Minneapolis).

After dropping off Rebecca and Aubrey at the airport early last Sunday morning (5:00 am) , Ella woke up at her normal time and started asking right away where Mommy and Aubrey were. She seemed more curious and was definitely not distraught so I thought that was a good sign. We had breakfast, got ready for church and pretty much had a normal day. Ella went down for her nap a little before 1:30pm and once I finished cleaning up the kitchen I decided I’d take a nap as well since I had gotten up so early. I laid down and was asleep before 2:00pm.

At at about 2:15pm I was in and out of sleep and very groggy but I thought I heard a siren going off. After getting my bearings I sat up in bed and confirmed that I was hearing sirens, tornado sirens. Now usually when I hear tornado sirens I don’t get too alarmed. Normally I just pop on the radio or TV to watch some severe weather cells pass close by or even over us without much danger. This time was no different. I casually walked downstairs and flipped on the TV. While I was waiting for the TV to fire up I decided to search for “Minneapolis tornado” on twitter just out of curiosity.   Here are the first three tweets I read, “Just sat through a tornado in St Louis Park“, “Just outran a tornado in Brooklyn Park, crazy!!!“, “Watch out Fridley, it’s coming“. Immediately the meteorologist had my attention. The first thing the guy said was “…please hold on a second I have to take this call from the National Weather Service…”, you could hear him pick up the phone and narrate what he was hearing. “The traffic cameras on Highway 100 and Interstate 694 have spotted a tornado moving into Fridley”. For those that don’t live here, that intersection is about 4 miles from our house.

OK this was more serious than usual, but I thought I’m going to go upstairs and see what I can see from our top floor windows. I know, I know, it sounds stupid but I really didn’t want to wake up Ella unless we were in real danger. Well we were. When I got upstairs the wind had picked up significantly and the rain was coming at the west windows sideways. I also noticed the tree in our backyard bending beyond what I thought possible before a break. At that point the urgency set in. I ran across the room  to head downstairs to grab Ella and I noticed the rain was now coming sideways at the east side of the house (ROTATION!)…I ran faster. I grabbed Ella out of her room covering her head with the blanket and darted downstairs into our laundry room in the back half of the house shutting all the doors behind me. As soon as I shut the first door we lost power but I was able to use my cell phone for light.

As we sat down in the laundry room, Ella was still groggy but was asking me with a hint of nervousness, “Funny Daddy, funny?!”. We could hear the wind pick up and whistling/whooshing noise all around us. That’s when the wall behind us started to shake a little bit. That freaked me out enough to start searching the room for the safest place to sit if the wall was going to fall in on us. It was at that point that things started to die down. Eventually the whistling and shaking stopped, my guess is the peak lasted 45 – 60 seconds. I waited there for a few more minutes just to make sure it wasn’t just a lull and then walked through the house to survey the damage. Looking outside I could see tree limbs everywhere. The neighbor to our north had what looked like a couple trees on his roof (one of which was ours) and part of his roof damaged. The neighbor two houses to the south had several major tree limbs sticking into her roof. I  quickly got Ella’s rain coat on and ran next door to make sure everyone was alright (they were). We could also see that we were missing some shingles, siding and facia off of our house. But compared to the rest of the neighborhood (and other areas of Minneapolis) our house was relatively unharmed. After calling around to make sure all nearby family and friends were alright, Ella and I drove to pick up my Mom so she could watch Ella while I surveyed the rest of the house more closely.

It was a frightening experience but we are just so thankful it wasn’t worse. In the end the National Weather Service rated the storm a strong EF-1. I’ve posted pictures of the aftermath around our house and neighborhood here, pictures from around Fridley can be found here and the damage to North Minneapolis can be viewed here.