Our little town made national news a couple nights ago. A killer tornado went right thru the center of Williamston.
The evening started out clear but blustery. I was going to bike to an evening event in the next town over. I saw stars and it was warm, but then I saw a couple lightning flashes and took the car instead. I thought it was odd to see both stars and lightning. As I drove I noticed more lightning—illuminating a single huge cloud, yet nearby the night sky was a clear dark blue with stars still. …Then the radio said tornado warning.
A friend who was driving to the meeting from Detroit said he saw the same thing but only in a more awesome way. From 30 miles away he saw the huge, tall cloud in the clear night sky. The cloud was *sparkling* with interior lightning.
The attached pic is a snapshot someone took of this exact cloud. You can see a star to the left of the illuminated cloud.
It was a stunningly intense cloud.
Like I’ve never seen around here.
A funnel cloud from this system touched down and went right thru the center of Williamston.
Now half of the downtown’s classic trees are gone! The town will have a new look. The shady main park by the river will be a sunny park.
Actually only about 10 houses seemed really hit hard, from what we could see. And the roads were clear by morning. Those crews work fast! Probably a 100 yards had major trees down—yet many of those huge trees managed to miss houses.
We rode our bikes around and saw several houses missing their top half, neighbors were out picking stuff up.
Some people whose house got wrecked are friends of friends—they had a dog that was hanging to the outside sill of a 2nd floor window after the funnel went over! They pulled him back in. Someone found a dead rabbit in a yard that was twisted into a corkscrew.
A friend lost a 3-foot thick catalpa tree that was growing right against the house. They had wanted this tree removed anyway—it got snapped the other, good, way like a twig. After the blast they looked out their windows with a flashlight and only saw leaves against all the windows! They couldn’t see out. 4 of their 5 big yard trees, in a small yard, went down…and none hit the house.
An older couple was killed when their modular home was blasted into their pond—it was their first night in their new house. They had had two other freak fatalities, and even a murder, in their family in the past 2 months. Whoa…
In a town north of us where the twister moved on to, a healthy baby in a crib was found outdoors in the yard under rubble.
It was the latest in October that a twister has ever struck this area.
Well, that’s the wild weather news!
