Welp … we survived Tropical Storm (Hurricane) Michael.
Rained pretty heavy most of the morning and into the afternoon. I was watching the center of the storm (the ‘eye’) heading right at us on the weather app on my phone. The NWS posted severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings for my county.
At just before 4PM, the ‘back side’ of the eye hit us with heavy rains and VERY strong and gusty winds. A tree of about 14+ inches in diameter, just off our front porch, snapped in half about 10 feet off the ground and fell onto our barn. Thankfully, it looks like it fell at a sufficiently oblique angle to glance off the barn without doing too much damage.
We (and about 23,000 other households) lost commercial power. I have a whole-home propane generator that automatically started with power dropped. We’ve been running on backup power for almost 30 hours now. The power utility company estimates having power back up sometime over the weekend.
The backup generator powers all of our critical infrastructure (well pumps, septic systems, hot water heater, refrigerators and freezers, etc.) and about 30% of the wall plugs. Interestingly enough, no lights. So, we have kerosene hurricane lamps, battery powered lanterns, and tactical flashlights to get around at night.
When the winds were at their highest, for about 5 minutes there, I thought *maybe* a tornado was in the vicinity. Pretty scary there for a few min. Poor Hunter short-circuited for a bit … making crazy eyes and looking like she was going to crawl into my back pocket or something.
When the sun came up this morning (next day), we had blue skies, very cool weather, a few trees down, quite a bit of water runoff, but everyone (animals) was okay.
From my perspective, the Michael storm was more intimidating than the Florence storm a few weeks ago. Less water dropped, but the Michael winds were pretty fierce.
All is well … that ends well. 😉