Some Storm

Early Tuesday morning, the sky darkened, the winds blew, thunder roared, and lightening flashed. In this summer of little rain, we had a storm; and this was some storm. The first casualty that we saw of the storm was a nearby utility pole. Apparently, this pole was connected to another pole across the street, which was also damaged. After the storm as we were running some errands, we saw countless broken branches and a number of entire uprooted trees. On the radio, we heard that forty some thousand customers were without power, and a roof was blown off a local business.

Tuesday afternoon, we had a brief power outage at our house. This relatively small branch apparently lay across the power lines causing a localized outage. We heard three extremely loud blasts, and a neighbor reported seeing flashes or sparks from the wire. Fortunately, our power company, NIPSCO, came and cut the culprit branch. Our power was restored within forty-five minutes.

The day after the storm, we surveyed the neighborhood. We saw that the utility pole was replaced. We also saw a number of damaged trees.