The boyfriend and I chose the wrong day to return from our weekend in Wisconsin, I guess.
It was a very uneventful 7-hour drive, give or take some cold drizzle, and we stopped at a gigantic area mall about 45 mins from home to pick up his graduation gift. It was overcast and a little breezy, but nothing really unusual for a fall day.
We were in the store and the lights flickered a couple of times. The manager was standing nearby and joked about closing down and sending everyone home, ha ha ha. When we left the store the wind had picked up a little bit and was blowing the boxes to the side, making us stumble toward the car. It was when we actually reached the car that all hell broke loose.
I was looking off into the distance, at some big power lines that seemed to be swaying more than they should. As I watched, they toppled to a decidedly unsafe angle over one of the major roads that feeds in mall traffic. Then, unbelievably, they came crashing down like dominoes, one right after the other.
I pointed and shouted something stupid like, "Oh no! Oh, look!" just as there was a gigantic transformer explosion to our left. It was this huge blue-white snap that was so bright it left spots in my vision. That was about the time that people started screaming...all of this had happened about 75 feet from us, across a crowded parking lot onto a busy road, and people were screaming and running toward the mall.
I was trying to figure out what this was...if it was a tornado, we should be in the mall, not the car. But the boyfriend was yelling that we needed to get the hell out of there, and it didn't
feel like a tornado, so we got in and went. The parking lot was a gauntlet of minivan and SUV drivers who were too busy gawking to watch where they were going. I remember seeing a group of people standing outside a restaurant right by a downed power line, looking at it, and thinking to myself how stupid that was.
We got out on the other side of the mall and it was like the fucking Apocalypse. Giant trees and signs were down left and right, traffic lights were doing full somersaults on their cables, and to our eyes every leaning power line looked like it was about to come down. A traffic cop had us all stopped at the major intersection before the freeway, right under a drooping power line, and I was sure somebody (maybe we) would be electrocuted at any moment.
The worst part was that for the agonizing few minutes we had to sit there, there was a Shell station beside us that looked as if it was going to just blow away. The roof of the gas shelter was rocking back and forth as if something was trying to pry it off. It looked exactly like that hurricane footage where there's just that rocking and suddenly it flies away. If it did, there was no telling what it'd hit...this was a really congested area.
The boyfriend was out of his mind, screaming at the traffic cop and all of the other people in their cars who were pausing to look at the damage. "Move, move, FUCKING MOVE!" We finally got on the freeway and it was a mess of rolling safety barrels and debris blown in from the cornfields. Another transformer exploded to our left, and when he saw that he stomped on the gas and we were going about 90mph, if not more. It was a scary trip home and I wasn't sure we were going to get home alive.
Our city was a total mess, trees down across the road, power lines drooping, trees crashed into houses. The boyfriend's job (an IT place) has been closed for two days now because of phones/power being down. Some places around here aren't expected to get power until after this weekend, and some places don't have water because there's no power to their wells. It's an utter mess.
And I think we were just supposed to have a few minor thunderstorms off the hurricane...no one was expecting this. If I were a Gulf Coast resident and knew this sort of thing was coming, I'd grab my valuables, board up the house and run like hell. We Ohio people had no idea, but damn, I do NOT understand the people who want to stick around in that shit.
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