Straight line winds

After returning from work pretty early on Friday Bob and I went for a walk. It has been nice to go out and work out with him now that he is home. After returning we both showered and he allowed me to watch some of my shows that had been dvred. After turning them off we see that the weather people have over taken the tv again. We were like what the heck, they were saying that there was a storm heading for Omaha but no tornadoes. All of a sudden our sirens were going off. We were confused b/c they were not saying anything on tv. It was just a gorgeous day out and it didn't seem warm enough for a tornado. They said that they are expecting 90mph winds coming through and that is why the sirens were going off. They stopped, we brought some stuff inside and I moved my hanging plant. The sirens started going off again so we went down stairs. I was making fun of Bob b/c he was making us be down there. Then we heard this huge rush of wind, and the electricity went out. We could hear the rain and the hail. After about 10 minutes we knew the sirens were not going off and it seemed like it had let up. We came upstairs to notice our roof was leaking a bit and we saw some tree limbs in the backyard. There were leaves and pea size hail everywhere. We went outside to see a huge tree across the street down, actually lots of trees across the street. One on to the neighbors house. A few that were blocking the road, and power lines down up the street. We checked out our cars and amazingly no hail damage, a tree just across the alley was uprooted and fell onto the neighbors garage. He was lucky as he didn't park his truck where he normally does. Bob and I walked around the neighborhood and saw a car stalled out as it was almost completely under water a block from our place. We also helped moved the trees that were blocking the road. We waited for 2 hours outside talking to neighbors and yelling at people trying to drive up the road. "Power Line, hey there is a power line down up there." Bob's favorite is about a guy that tried to give us an excuse about his cousin, then realized what did we care. After surveying the damage of others, we came home to realize that we had major hail damage on the duplex, one of our screens was pushed in upstairs from hail and the attic window is broken. There is also some cosmetic damage to the top of the duplex. We were very lucky that considering all the trees around that was it.

We still didn't have power around 7:30 so we went out to Council Bluffs to our friends Chris and Angela who were nice enough to let us sit in the comfort of electricity and enjoy good company. We stopped at Jimmy Johns for some dinner. Every fast food restaurant either didn't have power or had lines out the door trying to get food.

We returned home with no power still. We went to bed and woke up around 2:30 with the power coming back on. There are still people today with no power. These storms were bad. Two were killed.

I'm so glad Bob was home for this storm.