My Seussical Life for 2004 August 24

We spent a good deal of last evening curled up in the only safe place in our apartment: the cupboard under the building's main stairs. The city tornado sirens went off around 7:40, at which time a tornado touched down literally 7 miles away from our home. It was scary, but exciting in a surreal, hard-to-explain sort of way. The tornado warning lasted until 9:50.

Our street was flooded from the torrential rainfall that accompanied the thunderstorm that created the tornado. Apparently, the drain at our next door neighbor's curb is one of the main feeders to the Haskell-Baker Wetlands just south of us. The water was pouring down the hill above us, creating a rapid moving river that filled the street full of water above the curb, submerging at least two front-yards worth of lawn. It is hard to do it justice, writing about all the rain fall. The cars that stupidly drove through that stretch of the street were up to their headlights in water, and most often stalled in the middle of it. Crazy weather.