derecho
September
Suffice it to say I’m happy to have August 2020 in the rear view mirror.
We have completed our house repairs after the derecho. Having a brother in construction sure makes that easier! Repaired the cracked rafter, rebuilt the broken dormer, reshingled the roof… Tree guy is working this week to take down the trees that won’t survive (which is most of them).
School in Cedar Rapids is starting three weeks late due to all the storm damage, and will then be 100% virtual rather than 50/50 in person. This change has probably been harder on the kids than the storm was. They are so ready to have a routine again and see people.
Wonder where we’ll be when October 1 gets here? In 2020 every month feels like a year. I wonder how long that’ll last.
Quiet
Around 1:00 pm today, after 216 hours without power to the house and after logging 106 hours on the generator, power has been restored and the generator has been turned off.
The silence is blessedly welcome.
Incessant
It’s Sunday night. By tomorrow afternoon we’ll hit a week since the storm hit. No power yet. The power crew was relaxing a pole on a main line two blocks down this afternoon, so I’m hopeful maybe they’ll work their way down my street tomorrow.
Of course it’s also possible that they work the other direction, or work north before east, or any other number of things. I want to be unselfish and see my neighbors get power back and at the same point I’m so ready to get it back myself.
The noise of the generator is incessant. It’s a big one — 8000 watts — and it runs from when I start it in the morning at 7:30 until I turn it off around 10 in the evening. I’ve been thinking of it in some ways like a farmer’s work horse. Put it in the garage for the night, hope it rests well and feels good again tomorrow because I’m relying on it. So far so good.
Its noise is reminding me of running the Shop-Vacs in the basement during the flood of 2008. For one brutal night we had three vacs going to keep the water at bay. They had to be emptied every 30 minutes or so through the night. I sat upstairs with earphones on watching videos to try to stay awake, but I couldn’t get away from that wall of noise. The generator feels that way, too. Even inside the house with the windows shut, it’s there. Finally at night we shut it down and the quiet is so nice… but then of course there are no fans to cool us while we sleep.
We walked the neighborhood tonight and it looks like a war zone. Every house has trees down. Almost every house has either missing siding or a tarp on the roof or a fence down (or all three). Normalcy is years away, not months.
Tonight I’m sitting in a lawn chair out front of the house drinking a beer and watching the sun go down. It’s a little bit of partial peace at the end of a long week, disturbed only by that incessant noise of the generator.
Fragile
It’s the Friday after the Iowa derecho. What a week. After the devastation of the storm, the cleanup began. Monday night I had friends here to get the limbs on the ground and a tarp on the roof. Tuesday and Thursday they were back cutting up the trees that fell into our yard. By tonight all the trees are cut up and the limbs to the curb. All that remains is a backyard full of small branches and leaves which will be easily enough dealt with tomorrow.
The power company officially announced yesterday that power would be “substantially restored” to the county by next Tuesday. But the power company guy who was driving through our neighborhood last night informally told us to expect at least a week, maybe more. We have a tree on the line behind our house which affects at most about 6 homes. Fixing it is obviously a lower priority than fixing other downed lines that affect more people. It’s hard to argue with the logic but it’s a bummer to be at the end of the list. Thankfully we do have a generator which keeps lights, fans, and internet going.
The town is slowly reopening. The Chick-Fil-A our daughter works at reopened the drive through on Wednesday and is slowly expanding their open hours as they get staff available. Gas stations are now open enough that the lines have mostly gone away. Grocery stores are open. Schools are another story. School plans have moved from half-time attendance (thanks, COVID) to now potentially full-time virtual for the first few months of the school year. All the buildings in the district are damaged, and our girls’ high school is among the most badly damaged.
Now that the initial shock has worn off, the word that characterizes much of what I’m feeling is fragile.
The power to the house relies on a generator that needs to keep running. The fiber cable that brings internet to the house is suspended across the backyard by a few shepherd’s hooks. The roof over my daughter’s bedroom has a sizable chunk missing, with only some plywood and a tarp covering it. We have a cold front coming through tonight. The cooler temps will be welcome. The potential thunderstorms will not be.
The whole city infrastructure is fragile, so if anything else were to break or go wrong, it’s that much harder to get any help. It’s not like I need an electrician or a plumber every day, but it’s nice to know that I can generally get one if I have an emergency. This month? Not so much.
At this point in these kind of posts someone usually brings out an inspirational hashtag. I’ve seen #IowaStrong going around this week. (It’s been employed plenty of previous times, including the floods of 2008 and the floods again in 2016. I’ve seen the community rally, and I’ve had friends who’ve been great help. But I look around and see all the pain in my community, and tonight I’m having a hard time rallying. This just sucks, and will for a long time.
Devastation
Where to even start? Monday, August 10, somewhere around 12:30 PM, eastern Iowa got hit with a storm like no one had ever seen before. Technically known as a “derecho”, this storm brought 100+ MPH straight line winds along with torrential rain. 45 minutes later Cedar Rapids was transformed into a disaster zone. No one had power. Everyone had trees down, most of them on houses or cars, on power lines and across streets. As if 2020 wasn’t bad enough already…
I was working from home when the storm hit. Bouncing between the basement for safety and the upstairs so we could see what was going on, we were horrified at the storm, and then we started hearing things crashing. Then the house shuddered as a limb landed on it. When things cleared and we could go outside, we found a complete mess. Our huge locust tree in the front yard split down the middle, with the near side falling between the house and driveway. (The car in the driveway was spared, hallelujah.) The neighbor’s oak tree snapped in two and half of it lay across our front yard. The shared oak tree on our property line only dropped one limb, but it fell across the corner of the house, damaging the roof and some plaster inside.
In the backyard we lost a big limb from other other locust tree, lost most of our apple tree, and have the top half of the neighbor’s pine tree laying on our chain link fence. (And also on the power line.)
We’ve spent the last two days cleaning up branches and debris, scrounging the region for gas for the generator, and making temporary repairs. Nearly everyone in this city of 150,000 people has similar and worse damage. It’ll be months and years to get things repaired. It’ll be days if not weeks just to get power back on.
Tonight we’re trying to coax the cooler outside air into the house after it got to 85F outside today (81F in the house), listening to the generator hum, and catching up with the outside world. Blessedly, our internet line stayed up and we still have service from our ISP. Tomorrow morning a friend is coming with chainsaws at 8 AM and we’ll keep cleaning up. One day at a time is about all I can handle thinking about right now, anyway.
