Saturday, June 20, 2026
Day 3 was a nice, sunny Saturday. I got up early (at the hotel), got some breakfast at the buffet they had set up, and headed for a busy day at the house (since the hotel is only 5 miles away, it was easy to go back and forth).
The weather forecasters were already worried about a repeat of severe weather for most of the day on Sunday, so I checked the contents of my pole building to see what had been damaged and scope out what might be damaged by water, since 1-2 inches of rain was being predicted for Sunday. It was my first time in there and I found that a tree had crushed the door and exposed a lot of the ceiling. I figured that I had better get some tarps to at least cover up the stuff that was under the open roof sections.
I ended up going over to Home Depot and getting three large tarps, with one borrowed from my son, and covered up most of the equpment in there that could be damaged by heavy rain.
With that taken care of, I went back to the hotel to get some work done on my laptop computer and while I was there, about 3:15 p.m., my wife, who was still at the house, called and said the power had come back on. Kudos to all of the crews that had converged here to get the job done. Based on the damage that had been done and the sheer number of poles that had to be replaced, I felt like 72 hours without power was really a short time, considering.
I got all of our stuff out of the hotel and headed for home. I would return to the hotel and check out the next morning.
As the day ended, I hoped I was ready for the severe weather that was predicted for Sunday.
By Saturday, the NWS had scoped out all of the damage and gave their official report on the tornado. It turned out that we were in the bulls-eye and took a direct hit.
