Seventeen trees. The storm that delivered a tornado to Wethersfield crossed the Connecticut River, skipped over Route 2, and ended up tearing up our yard, knocking down 17 trees - in just our front yard. There are a bunch more - huge trees, uprooted, some of them - in the side yard and way out back in the woods.
This happened on Friday, another in a long stretch of dreary, rainy summer days. But a warm front met a cold front, resulting in the perfect cocktail for a severe storm.
We, of course, watched this develop on TV, and I, for one, thought little of it. I mean, how many times do weather forecasters hype weather events in Connecticut? When we were watching on Friday, even, one of the channels had a reporter in a car somewhere in West Hartford and he reported that the "storm drains were overflowing."
We laughed.
But the storm cell on TV was eeriely red, angrily red, and it was headed toward East Glastonbury. We are right over the line. Still, I thought it would be heavy thunder, maybe some lightning, and more rain, which we had become used to.
Then the hail started to come down in torrents. The ice pellets bounced off our skylight and deck. The storm was serious. We quickly lost power. The skies darkened.
My wife asked, "Should we go downstairs?"
And I'm thinking no, why would we need to do that. I usually like to watch these storms from the doorway, or outside under the roof of our entryway. I would stay outside until the last minute if I didn't have a family...
But something about this one made me think otherwise. The wind, specifically, was picking up in the backyard at a rate that I hadn't seen. Leaves started shedding frm the trees in the backyard. They swirled violently. So we grabbed the kids, took a candle and headed into the dark basement.
A minute or two later, when the winds seemed to die down, I returned upstairs to see a huge tree dropped over my wife's car, another 70-foot maple laying rather stoically on the front walkway, toppling the hemlocks along our driveway. It was still windy, at this point, so I went back downstairs and said, "There are some trees down out there. Big ones." I tried to be calm about it, but ended up being too simple and vague.
When my wife came up to see, she kind of freaked.
Within five minutes, we all came up from the basement and surveyed our devastated yard from inside. Our power line dropped to the ground, the utility pole on the street crashed near our driveway. We would soon learn that our street had been wracked by what was left of the tornado - maybe it was still a tornado, but possibly not. Wethersfield seemed to get it worse. (At least it got most of the media attention.) Still, the guys with Connecticut Light and Power estimated winds here to be between 80 and 90 miles per hour.
In the end, there was no serious property damage - just to our gutters and existing trees. But the number of trees that had fallen was enormous. The tree guy billed us for $5,000 worth of tree removal in the front yard alone (paid for, kindly, by our insurance company, thankfully). More trees fell in the back and side yards, but they did not damage property, which is a huge limitation when trees come down during a storm. The insurance companies usually only pay when the trees fall on something.
But we were OK, a bit jarred from it all, though.
But not jarred enough to miss Opening Night at Tanglewood to see Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion for the fourth straight year. The show on Saturday was great -Steve Martin, Martin Sheen, and Arlo Guthrie were all there. It just sucked coming home, facing reality - a yard full of damaged trees and property, not knowing exactly where to start cleaning up, or whether to start, feeling overwhelmed by the destruction.
