Wednesday, August 15, 2007

It was a DANDY storm!!!

Wow! We had a jim dandy storm Monday night. It was an awesome sight for us avid storm watchers. There were a number of park model patios damaged but I don’t have any names of the unlucky residents. There was a 5th wheel parked out in the storage area that blew over and really got wrecked. The saddest part was to see all the pretty pine trees that were downed. For some reason, they seem to topple easily.

On my way to work Tuesday morning, I saw plenty of downed trees and tree limbs as I drove down McMurray Drive. Folks at the store talked about all the downed power poles out in the country. Some back roads were totally blocked due to fallen poles and hot wires. One school was closed due to damage and a mobile home park south of town had heavy damage. Las Casitas mobile home park had quite a few homes damaged where people had to move out to shelters. Some of the mobile homes were actually moved off their foundations. Parts of town were without electricity for a number of hours Monday night till the crews could get out and help with some of the downed lines.

City crews (and Palm Creek crews) were out in force Tuesday morning to clean up the debris and return to normalcy. There wasn’t a lot of rain but what we did have came down all at once and completely sideways in the strong wind. The weather channel says Casa Grande had over 2000 lightning strikes within two hours. At times the street lights would go out because they were tricked into thinking dawn was approaching with all the steady lightning.

Summer is moving along rapidly. We’re now rather tired of the heat and are waiting for cooler temps.