Hurricane Ike

I know most folks don’t associate Hurricanes with inland states like Ohio and Indiana. The fact is they do come inland from time to time and they can be really damaging to regions where they aren’t often seen. Hurricane Ike did just that this weekend. It blew through Indiana dumping all sorts of rain on them that caused a lot of flooding. Then it headed into Ohio with 70mph+ winds. That’s strong enough to be a category 1 hurricane – pretty strong for something that has traveled all the way from Texas in a matter of days/hours. Anyone watching the Bengals play may have noticed how all the coaches pants were whipping sharply in the wind. It was windy.

We started off our Sunday in Pennsylvania after attending the last wedding of wedding season. Drove to visit the boy’s grandparents because his grandmother’s birthday was Monday. We had a wonderful visit and then headed home where we were greeted by strong winds and widespread power outages. Once home we started to survey the damage on our back lot. None of our trees were toppled but a few large branches from our neighbors’ backyard fell onto our property (not hitting anything hooray!) and they lost a rather large cherry tree. We were pretty lucky because our power came back on Sunday night (I think we are on the same power grid the local hospital is on) however not many were that lucky. My parents were out of power until Monday evening, it came back on and then went off again. There are at least 200,000 households in central Ohio alone right now that are out of power. Schools were canceled across the state Monday, across the region today and are starting to call off again tom’w. This could spell trouble if we have the hard winter everyone is predicting.

Part of the reason for the delay in restoring our power is because our crews were down in Texas helping out those folks. I am sure the power companies never dreamed the hurricane would make it this far inland and cause so much damage. They had to recall their employees and get them home as well as get aid from neighboring states. Right now they hope to have most households turned back on by Sunday evening.

I know this hasn’t made it to the national news because it seems so minor compared to the devastation in Texas. We are all rather lucky it’s mostly an inconvenience. It has been a bit scary with all of the downed power lines and large chunks of trees blown into the road as well as people who don’t know how to treat a traffic signal that is out. If you know anyone in the area, give them a call and make sure they are doing alright. We could use some cheering up and sympathy at this point as well as hot meals and showers.

Pictures from our yard and the neighbors yard