Violent weather through town
13 January 2007, 10:26 PM

It's been an exciting Saturday. Late Friday night and on into early this morning, rains pounded our area. Around 5 am or so, loud claps of thunder woke us up. At six a.m. our power went out and stayed out for an hour.

That in an of itself is unusual. We live rather close to a power substation, so usually violent weather takes out our power for only a minute or two. Since much of our computer and communications equipment is on UPS (battery power backup systems) we were able to check the weather radar until we decided to shut things off and conserve the batteries.

The storms were a result of the cold air mass currently causing havoc to the north of us and warm air masses coming out of the Gulf. (It was 72 degrees outside yesterday. It's 39 degrees now, just a little over 24 hours later.)

This morning we headed out for breakfast and some groceries before the predicted sleet and snow and saw some considerable damage. Of course there were closed roads due to flooding and raging water in the ditches, creek and river.

Turns out there was also a tornado in that storm, that touched down about 5 to 7 miles from where we live. It destroyed one home's roof and a massive tree in town, skipped across a field and then tore a roof off of a manufacturing building and planted it on top of a bunch of police cars.

Across the highway a furniture store took damage to it's metal roof, which was strewn about the highway and wrapped around power lines. I-35 itself was shut down, both northbound and southbound lanes, this morning for a time, probably from storm strewn debris.

It looks like the tornado petered out somewhere just north of the outlet mall that got pounded by hail last April.

We should be seeing some sleet or snow tomorrow night.