order of events

I was surprised to reflect, a few days later, that the sounds of destruction had occurred in a rather linear fashion. It wasn't chaotic, with glass shattering and water spewing and bricks falling all at once; it was bricks falling, then window exploding, then door slamming: boom, boom, boom....

[Note: The storm came from the west-southwest, and the center of the track was just south of us. So the winds blew from the north, as if the tornado were folding everything into itself.]

Actually, let me take them one at a time. First it was the wind roaring. Not howling, but roaring. A circular roar that I thought sounded like a too-close helicopter. I've heard others say it sounded like a jet sitting over their house, and of course there is the freight train analogy. (One friend said, "It just sounded LOUD.")

We could hear it getting closer (louder), and then we heard glass shattering on the other side of the house. Tom said, "There went the back doors," because we have two sets of french doors that open onto the patio, and that would logically have been the first to go. Fortunately, we were mistaken; the sound was actually the storm door, the full panel of glass that shielded our front door. (Our neighbors on either side also lost their front storm doors, and I think the air pressure burst those doors instead of sucking out/blowing in the windows across the fronts/north sides of our houses.)

Next we heard/felt something happen on the roof, which I thought was going to leave a gaping hole over our living room. Turns out it was the roofing over the porch being pulled off, and our chimney being toppled. The porch has a flat roof, and its roofing and gutters were mostly gone. The columns on the east side of the house were askew, indicating that end of the flat roof had been lifted enough to shift the supports.

The chimney broke off right at the roofline, and it fell onto the driveway below. My Explorer took the brunt of the impact; it was bent such that the driver's door wouldn't open, and it had been pushed about two feet from where I had parked it. Either the bricks pushed it or the tornado lifted and dropped it, or maybe a little of both. The rear hatch was destroyed. Even the hydraulics were ripped out.

The bricks also landed on the front end of Tom's Subaru. A bench from the front porch had been slammed into the rear quarter panel, and half of the windows were shattered.

Typing on my phone is tricky, so I will publish this as it is and complete the description of the way things happened when I get back to a real keyboard.

--Jennifer
The new normal isn't shiny