Yo, ho, blow the man down!

Or tree.

We had a huge storm blow through the area the other day. It hit us in the Portland/Vancouver area just about the time kids were getting out of school. It was windy all day, but around 3pm it just started pouring. Between the rain and the wind, trees have been downed all over. A bunch fell on to the eastbound lanes of I-84 in Oregon, shutting the freeway down. Portland's sewage lines couldn't handle the ridiculous amount of rain and backed into the Willamette River. Parts of the city flooded, including the MAX (light rail rapid transit) lines. There are videos from Halloween where the train is flooded with water a foot over the bottom of the door--the train was still operating with it full of water. We had more rain this time than on Halloween. And a bunch of people lost power. We were fine. The only damage in our area that I could see was one tree down. In our front yard.

Meagan came home after the storm was over and was like, "um, do you guys know the tree out front fell over?"

It completely crushed our recycling bin and Owen's basketball hoop (which you can't see because it's under the tree). We can sort of access the garbage can. I think we can pull it out for trash day tomorrow. Luckily, the recycling doesn't get picked up again until next Friday.


The whole tree just fell over, pulling the roots up. You can't really tell from the pictures, but our driveway is pretty steap. This tree was always kind of leaning because of the angle of the land, and it looked really old. It's some kind of plum tree. I hated it because it was growing all of these little offshoots at the base which I think helped with the whole falling over thing.

Now we just have to get a hold of the landlady to have it removed.

Anyway, all of that is nothing compared to other parts of the state. Seattle got slammed. My friend said she had to chase her neighbors garbage cans down the street because of the wind, and her son's school lost power so they had to turn some generators on. Something like 300k people were with out power after the storm from falling trees knocking out powerlines. I think there was flooding in Tacoma and more power outages.

The east side of the statewas even worse. They had to shut down part of I-90 because of the wind and blowing dirt. Spokane was hit with hurricaine force winds to the point where an emergency alert went out begging people to stay where they were and ride out the storm. Three people died when trees fell on them. I also read that somewhere in Colorado, north of Denver they had 100mph wind gusts creating white out conditions with all the snow they were getting instead of rain.

So I'm happy the worst we saw was one downed tree. And I'm glad the kids got home from school before it started and that I didn't have to be anywhere because traffic was a nightmare between the torrential downpour, winds, and backups from closed roads and accidents. I commented on an article in the local paper and their copy editor responded that her husband was stuck on the I-205 bridge on his motorycycle right in the middle of the storm. It was raining so hard you couldn't see anything and the wind on that bridge is ridiculous because it sits at the mouth of the Columbia River Gorge. You get rocked like crazy even on a calm day. It took him hours to get home. Poor guy.