Wow, Look at That Sun. Sure is Bright. Yep. Bright.

The last 5 days here have been nothing short of chaotic. Around 7:30p on Wednesday night, a very large and very unexpected storm rolled in from the north and unleashed its near-apocalyptic wrath down upon St. Louis and the surrounding counties.

It was an odd storm to begin with; a northerly approach is almost unheard of around here. From what I’ve heard, the storm was passing north of the city when it made a sharp right turn and slammed into the northern counties, packing winds in excess of 75mph. The storm hit so hard that even the city’s electrical system gave a collective ‘what the hell?’ before dying in spectacular fashion. Power at my place died a total of 3 times before remaining off and leaving me scrambling for candles.

Those of you who know me know that I love thunderstorms. Needless to say, I was in hog heaven. Even with the rain pelting everything and the high winds blowing me around, my dumb ass was outside watching nature at its finest. The wind was more than unrelenting, tossing around loose tree limbs and bending even the most well grounded trees as if they were saplings. The sky couldn’t decide what color it wanted to be, as it shifted from dark green to orange, and then finally to a deep gray. I couldn’t get over the colors, the altitude of the storm, and the multiple layers of clouds moving in various speeds and directions. It was all very, very impressive.

There were reports of tornados, and the sirens did eventually start wailing, but all of that nastiness avoided my area; what we got was an obscene amount of rain. You know it’s raining hard when you can’t see the houses across the street because of the cats, dogs, pigs, sheep, chickens, and various other small farm animals falling from the sky.

Eventually it all blew over, but not before visiting downtown St. Louis and disrupting the Cards ballgame. It even managed to blow out the press box windows on the brand new stadium. In all, it affected every section of the city and left over 500,000 homes without power. That’s homes, not people, and makes for about 1/3rd the population of St. Louis and surrounding sub divisions. The streets around home were alive with emergency vehicles that didn’t even bother going back to the station after a call.

Pretty big deal all in itself, but that isn’t where the entirety of the problem was. Thursday was forecast to be 100+ degrees including the high levels of humidity. Anyone who knows how humidity affects heat knows that this isn’t a good situation, and when Mr. Mayor cried emergency, the National Guard showed up to evacuate people to ‘cooling centers’ throughout the city. This, of course, landed us national new coverage of sorts, because bad news is always good for ratings. Something of note that I found interesting: In all of the coverage of this widespread blackout and bad weather, you didn’t hear one report of crime, on a large scale or otherwise. I am sure there was plenty of crime, but we didn’t hear about it.

Thursday night was the hardest, with 100 degree weather and 80% humidity that persisted well into the midnight hour. I found out that this made sleep all but impossible as I ferried a small army of pillows around from place to place, looking for a cool spot somewhere in the house. At 3am, I finally decided the car would be the best place to salvage the night, so I started her up, got comfortable, set the climate control on 80, put on some music, and crashed out. Only burned ¼ tank of gas, I don’t think that was too bad at all.

Friday, a more traditional storm blew in from the west at around 11:00am. This storm was along the same caliber of Wednesday’s storm, with winds reaching 65 mph, horizontal rain bands, and a couple of tornados on the outlying edge. In some ways, this storm was exceptionally violent, and even prompted emergency measures to be taken at work. I watched the storm roll in, and I have never, in my life, seen a sky that dark. It may as well have been the dead of night. The street lights would have been on if they’d had power to run. Needless to say, this storm undid a lot of Thursdays’ efforts by the power company to restore power to the city.

I’ve got power back now, but there are still somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 without power last I heard. In all, I was without power for 3 days. Given the severity of the two storms, the fact the power company has reduced the outage by almost half says a lot about the power company in my estimation. They aren’t a government or city service, so they do a thankless job getting customers back online, and personally I think they deserve a cookie.

On a side note, a tree has so many branches. That being said, how is it possible for TONS of branches to be all over the yards of so many houses, and the trees still have branches? The mind boggles.