Tornado Update

While extremely rare, tornadoes still occur here in New England.  We had some storms roll through Monday night.  There was a lot of lightning, some loud thunder and torrential downpours.  As I was heading up to bed, I saw that there was a tornado warning for the Cape.  We were at home, not on the Cape, because the girls were attending a camp, and they have dance on Tuesday nights.  I picked them up from camp at noon on Tuesday and got caught up in making, eating and cleaning up lunch.

Grammy text me shortly after lunch telling me that there had been a tornado on the Cape around noon and did I know what was going on with the cottage.  Ah, no.  Rich and I have had conversations like this before, after storms have gone through and I always say that as the property owners, the town has our information and I'm sure they could find us if they needed to.  Like if a tree went through the roof.  And I hate to sound all nonchalant because that cottage was purchased with hard earned money, but it is insured and it's a cottage, not our primary residence.  Hopefully, our biggest loss would be time.

I picked up my phone to assess the situation and saw that Rich had shared a video on FB from a business located less than a quarter of a mile behind us.  They had filmed through their front door during the storm and everything they had outside had been destroyed.  Then I read confirmation that a tornado had touched down in South Yarmouth, lifted, traveled over where our cottage is located and touched down again.  Rich and I started texting because now I'm not so sure I want to wait for the end of the week to see if there's any damage.  I searched for our village under places on IG and the most recent posting showed uprooted trees.  The poster listed their street and shared five photos of trees leaning against houses and fallen across yards.  All on one street not far from us.

Grammy said she could watch the girls and bring them to dance so I grabbed a couple of coolers in order to clean out the freezer and drove down to check out the cottage.  We've had several major hurricanes hit Massachusetts during my lifetime and I could still not believe all of the wind damage I witnessed when I exited Route 6.  Almost everyone was without electricity.  Major intersections were without working traffic lights.  Cars were lined up to enter the one gas station with power.

I didn't know if I was even going to be able to drive down our street, which is a dead end. I came to road closed signs on the street leading up to ours so I had to loop around and head up the other way.  There's a parking lot and businesses nearby so I figured I could just park there and walk if I needed to.  I was able to make it down our road.  The street off of ours was closed right after our road because the road in front of us had been hit hard and there were trees down everywhere.

Amazingly enough, our cottage and property were mainly untouched. There were a bunch of fallen branches but we aren't talking anything big at all.  A neighbor had pushed our grill to the other side of the patio near the shed and had stacked our patio chairs over there as well.  My first fear is a tree falling on the house.  My second is a flying object launching itself through one of our sliding glass doors.  That sunporch kind of sticks out from the rest of the cottage and the glass doors feel so exposed to me.

Almost all of the damage on our road happened on the other side from us.

These are photos of our neighbors across the street.

Across the street and three houses down, a tree did land on and damage the roof.

This is such a cute cottage.  I don't know who owns it because we've only seen people there once over the past two and a half years.

It does make you wonder why some streets have more damage than others.  Obviously, some trees are older, have more rot, or are more susceptible to wind damage, but in looking at our side of the road versus the other side, it was almost like something whipped through over there and mostly missed us.  The news is saying that we were hit with severe straight-line wind damage of 90+ mph.  If you search online, you can see a video of a roof being ripped off of a hotel in Yarmouth.  For New England, this is crazy weather!

I found this metal chimney cap on the patio less than 10 feet from our sunporch.  We can't figure out where it came from and no one has claimed it yet.  Thankfully, it didn't go our glass doors!

We had friends over last night for pizza and pool time so we made the drive down to the cottage this morning.  Rich didn't bring his chainsaw because we didn't have any large branches down.  Well, we pull into the driveway and realize there is a gigantic limb hanging from one of the pines.  If that was there on Tuesday, I did not see it.  I think I would have I have seen it!  (And I realize it's not that easy to see in my photo below.)

THANKFULLY, no one was killed or injured as a result of this storm, which is amazing.  Seriously, go search for video footage.  Mother Nature is the boss lady!