Pensacola's big ole storm, and floods and fires.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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It’s all anyone is talking about 'round here, so I thought I’d share with the boards!

Here in Pensacola, we experienced a helluva storm on Tuesday night. In our house, I was in the kitchen grating up some cheese when the transformer on a pole in front of our place got struck by lightning. It made the loudest, most tremendous boom you’ve ever (or hopefully never) heard- and according to the neighbors, the brightest flash also. I jumped about a mile. I told my husband I wouldn’t be surprised if there was cheese on the ceiling! The house went immediately black after that.

Well, I was one of just 3 people in my whole neighborhood but tens of thousands in the city to lose power. So we expected to pretty low priority, and sure enough, it was this morning before power came back. 36 hours, if you’re counting. Which is not so terrible, when you live in hurricane country and sort of expect power outages to last a long time. We are very grateful that this one happened in a 60 degrees April instead of a 100 degrees August. The worst of it: I am pretty sure that 85% of our fridge and freezer contents have to be thrown out, but I have not had time to inspect them all yet.

Driving around yesterday and today, the flooding is pretty intense. It’s weird seeing huge chunks of road gone all over the place. Even weirder are all the stranded cars, half perched on concrete embankments, on medians, in ditches. They’ve got water lines on the dashboards, mud and leaves hanging from the tailpipes, and many with no owners in sight. It’s getting back to normal now, but was all very very eerie.

We were very very upset to find out that the local food pantry was pretty much destroyed. This is a major loss, since they are a chief food provider to the hungry in our community.

A couple of places downtown where my husband works and had instruments stored have been totally flooded, so that was a minor concern, but thankfully his stuff got moved out of harm’s way.

The other thing that flooded was our storage facility. When I moved in with Mr. Dorky, there was very little room for my stuff, so basically everything I owned is in there. Including (in a cardboard box) the 4-5 pieces per year of LittleDorky’s artwork, starting from age 1.5 all the way to the end of the last school year. We won’t be able to get in there until tomorrow or Saturday to survey the damage. Our unit is just slightly to the right of the frame in the picture, and it’s a drier spot than some others, so it might actually be ok.
Finally, after all that fun, we retired early last night, not having power and all, and missed the explosion at the jail about a mile and a half from our house. Link. This was another somewhat disconcerting event, since the news stories all slipped in casually that two or three inmates were unaccounted for!! Luckily, that concern has since been remedied. Nobody is sure whether the explosion is somehow flood related.

I speculate that, this being the thick of the bible belt, we’ll be hearing some bellowing about “end times” and “repenting” in the coming weeks!

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I’m sorry for all you have been thru & I hope most, if not all of your stuff is fine, but this made me laugh way to much.

Take Care.

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That sounds really scary! Glad everyone is OK (and the inmates, too).

I remember when I was around 9-10 years old, we had a lightning strike on a transformer in my neighborhood. This would have been in the early-mid 90s. Everyone was walking around outside talking about it. Nowadays everyone would be facebooking about it, of course.

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Hey, glad y’all are OK, and now we have to wonder what sort of egregious sinning would they be doing in Pensacola to call down this kind of a smiting…

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Actually, I think a couple of inmates died. They still have not said anything about why they think the explosion happened. But! Rest assured the news will talk of nothing else, so even though I rarely watch it, the info will trickle down by hook or by crook (or by face book) before long.

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Thanks for the kind words! The whole situation is so weird that it’s mostly funny. It really was a terrifying, terrifying storm, though. Right after that happened, I was calling the power co. to report the outage, and my phone promptly and completely died. Thought I, “I’ll just run out to the car and plug it in and call from the car.”

Said car was out in the driveway, 5 feet from the covered car port. As I was drumming up the courage to run that distance- this really was angry horrible lightning like I had never seen before, shooting down all over the place and constant. It looked like daylight outside. Anyway, as I was standing there, slightly edgy as you can imagine, I glimpsed a palm frond behind my car waving in the wind which looked exactly like a person hulking down with an arm thrown up over his head. As I was pondering that, my son peered out the screen door at me and somehow cast a weird shadow (there’s a ginormous floodlight shining down from the house behind us). Poor kid caught hell for scaring me!

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We’re in P’cola, too. The thunder and lightning was incredible! At one point, I would have sworn it hit either the porch or driveway (a loud SNAP) it sounded that close. Needless to say we got almost no sleep. In fact, it wasn’t until yesterday that I was really able to sleep.
We had to go out Wednesday afternoon and that was a trick—had to turn around three times to get to our destination because streets were still flooded. Abandoned cars everywhere. I can’t believe how the roads have caved in. This feels almost like the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan and will probably take as long for repairs. And then the jail exploding…scary times here on the gulf!

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According to the NWS cumulative rain total, a large area got 22-26 inches(58-66 cm) of rain. Holy Noah, Batman! What you got was more than some hurricanes. Glad you are safe.

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/mob/?n=flashflood_04292014