Powerless & Powerful

9 am Sunday.

24 hours ago, I started writing this article.

42 hours after the “Storm of the Century”, as someone called it.

The “Storm of the Century” title may be relinquished one day as we are only 12 and a half years into this one.

Here’s a quick recap for those of you who are not in Fort Wayne, Indiana followed by lessons and observations.

Friday we had a 20% chance of rain.  Many were hopeful but doubtful too.

Weather has been freaky the past several months.  A mild winter, a short spring and a long hot, dry winter.  We are missing 8 inches of rain this year and the farmers are hurting.

But at 2 pm Friday I could see storm clouds off in the distance from my 6th floor downtown office.  Just before 3pm “it” hit.

From our view we saw a massive wind and rainstorm and for awhile our visibility was nearly zero.  A few minutes later, we could see a medium sized tree and fallen on a car 1/2 a block away.  Otherwise it just looked a big, fast rain storm and passed through town.

Around 3:30 our building lost power.  We had emergency back up lights come on which light up the hallways, but by 4:15, I was heading down the stairs with my laptop and files to work on over the weekend.

As I exited the building I noticed the temperature had dropped 30 degrees from 95 to 65 and the rain had basically stopped.

But what I was about to see was what really happened with the storm.

There were power outages and the most noticeable were traffic lights being out.

But the most dramatic scene was I was inching my way home was the downed trees.

Nearly every block had tree limbs down or entire trees uprooted.

My wife called to tell me our neighbor had a tree land on her garage and since neither was home, that was my first stop once I got to our neighborhood.

Sure enough, this massive tree had snapped and was laying on top of her garage. When she got home friends, family and neighbors were pitching in to get things taken care of including getting a tree service to come and safely remove the tree.

Here is one of the photo galleries of damage from the storm: http://interactives.wane.com/photomojo/gallery/3335/

I titled this Powerless and Powerful.

Powerless can refer to the lack of electricity that affected over 100,000 in the Fort Wayne area that are slowly and steadily having their electric service restored.

Powerless is also about our ability, or lack of ability to prevent damage caused by a storm of this magnitude.

Powerful refers to the strength of the storm that had hurricane force winds of 91 miles per hour ripping trees out of the ground.

Powerful also refers to the community that I saw come together.

A couple of examples include my neighbors whom I’ve mentioned.

My wife who jumped into action when her grandson came over worried about an elderly relative who has no power.  They packed supplies including ice to take to her and make sure she was safe.

Speaking of ice, one of our towns coffee shops, Old Crown posted this on his Facebook page:

If anybody needs some ice, grab your bag, bucket or cooler and head over to OC. The guys will fill up your container as long as we still have some (we have a pretty beefy ice machine and the feed water is purified with R.O.). We’ll be open until 11p tonight and back open at 8a Sunday. No charge.
Best.
Mike

A few final words:

I was amazed as I saw not just the damage from the storm, but the damage that was avoided by the storm. So many trees that could have fallen on homes and people instead fell next to houses and across streets.  50 foot trees, 75 foot trees that could have caused hundreds of people to become homeless, fell away from homes or caused minimal damage.

I was encouraged by the coming together of people to help, without asking about their political beliefs that have created a lot of division lately.

I am also awestruck at the power of God and his creation in nature at how this whole chain of events occurred and impact it is having on individuals lives.