Storm Clouds

The weekend we installed the rain chain certainly turned into a test of how well we installed everything.

It was a beautiful Saturday with no indication that the weather would change but change it did. By that night, we had 60 mile hour winds and tornados to our north. No surprise, the amount of rain and hail absolutely overwhelmed our new gutter. We had first thought that a falling limb had crushed the gutter but found the next morning that it had filled completely with leaves in a matter of minutes.

The next morning, our back patio was a mess. To give you an indication of the strength of the wind, we don’t even have a tree in our backyard—the entire branch had blown in from a neighboring yard.

We cleaned up our yard and walked around the neighborhood to survey the damage. On our street alone, three trees came down and more branches than we could count. The trees took down power lines, landed on cars, and one even went through the roof of a neighbor’s garage. On a cross street, another huge tree came down (also taking power lines along with it) so we were essentially blocked in for the morning.  We were very fortunate though—given what happened in other parts of the Midwest, it could have been much worse.