Storm Central
August 30th, 2006,My little corner of the world got shaken up last week when it was hit by severe storms. Last Thursday, August 24, was a strange day, as my town of Northfield, Minnesota, and neighboring areas experienced two periods of large hail and later a tornado watch. Our family was at home all day, and we experienced its surreal events together.
The first wave of hail that morning was impressive enough; its largest pieces were golf-ball-sized. But in the second round, which happened an hour or two later, the hail was as large as baseballs. We heard it slamming into the roof and saw it smashing into the ground and bouncing around our courtyard. I’ve never seen such hail in my life. Any living thing without shelter would likely have been killed by such a pummeling.
When the weather quieted down that afternoon, I went out to investigate. The ground was littered with heavy white iceballs and pocked with holes where the hail had hit. There were lots of leaves and branches down. Nearly every car that was outside had windows broken—often completely smashed out—and large dents in the body. A neighbor told us how he had gone to the hospital to have glass removed from his ear and face after hail shattered the window next to him as he sat out the storm in a car.
When a neighbor and I investigated the damage to our townhouse association, we found broken windows, dents in the roofs and gutters, and lots of small holes in our vinyl siding. That pattern was repeated throughout the area, we later learned, with some areas receiving even more damage. In the town of New Prague, the hail was softball-sized.
After the hail, the bad weather wasn’t over yet. That evening more storms rolled through with, this time generating tornadoes. We huddled in our basement listening to reports from radio station KOWZ in Owatonna, which had suspended all programming to provide information about the storm. The next day we learned that tornadoes had done considerable damage to the south, particularly in LeSueur County, with at least one person killed.
We also received heavy rain throughout the storms. My rain gauge told me that we got nearly four inches of rain.
In the days following the storm I saw that it generated a different kind of detritus: signs and pamphlets from building contractors eager to capitalize on the storm damage. It was strange to see pickup trucks prowling the street, looking for customers—or possibly victims? There have already been reports of scams by swindlers preying on anxious homeowners.
For our homeowners association, there may yet be a silver lining in the storm. We may possibly get new roofs, gutters, and siding out of it. But what if you were uninsured, or what if you were physically injured by the storm?
What I’m left with is the strangeness of our world, which can rain down chunks of ice from the sky.
Note: For more on the storm, including lots of photos, see excellent citizen-based coverage at our remarkable community web site, Northfield.org. There is a follow-up story as well.