Dusty Hurricane

Yesterday, the weather service kept warning us about high winds.  We were to have gusts as high as 60 mph.  Not quite hurricane strength, but strong enough to blow anything away that's not nailed down.  We had a grungy looking gray day, but the winds were light...until just before 4:30 p.m.  Then mother nature let us know she was the boss!

Not our town, but this is similar to what it looked like.

All of a sudden, there was a very loud boom and the house shuddered.  The roof creaked, snapped and groaned rather loudly.  The noise outside from the wind was pretty amazing!  That sudden onset of rushing air also brought with it a very thick cloud of dirt.  I'm sure it wasn't as dramatic as the dust storms that Phoenix gets, but it was hard to see across the street.  Then a little bit of rain got mixed in, so it seemed we were upgraded to a mud storm!  I wish I'd had my wits about me enough to grab a camera and take a picture, but I was just standing at the window, watching the thrashing we were taking from such bizarre weather.


I turned on the scanner and listened to the very busy police, fire and EMS traffic.  There were runaway dumpsters, trash cans, and large debris like tree limbs blowing around, power lines down, and one neighborhood even had a rogue trampoline!  The police managed to corner it and hold it in custody until the owners could retrieve it, though.  I'm sure there are many things that nobody managed to catch.  I imagine that Canada is probably trying to decide how to clean up the junk we "dontated" to them yesterday!

It was all over in about half an hour.  The weather station for the town registered a peak wind gust of 58 mph.  Then the wind died down, the dust settled, and I gave a sigh of relief that we still had a roof!