2008 Roars In With The Wind

JANUARY 4, 2008 - Will certainly go down in "history" here in Walla Walla, WA. - My mom & I started out that morning to take some flowers out to the cemetery as it was the anniversary of my dads death 10 years ago. It seemed a bit windy outside but I thought, "Hey we might as well take the flowers out anyway" even though my mom questioned my judgement. Just as we pulled up to the cemetery entrance we discovered the gates were locked. Right then a gigantic tree inside the cemetery came crashing to the ground. Needless to say I was more then willing to head back home at that point. We had Coleen with us and the poor little girl was scared of all the wind and noise so I had to get her inside and calmed down. Once we got back home we discovered that our power was out. I kept noticing people driving down our street suddenly turning up one of the side streets instead of going on down the street and I wondered why so I ventured outside and discovered the reason, a tree just down the street from us had fallen across the power lines. I took Coleen over to my mom's and braved the elements to walk down the street and take a few photo's. It was a LONG day without power. My husband was out of town and I had a difficult time contacting him as my Cell Phone battery was nearly dead and then the service kept going out. He had to drive back to town with a truck and trailer and got home about 4:00 pm safe & sound! - Our power was restored about 5:00 that evening thankfully. As of today there are still homes without power even though the power company has had 22 crews working round the clock to try and restore power. Our parks and the cemetery look like disaster areas. Some of these pictures were taken the day after the storm. It was just amazing to see the damage that was done. The last official wind report that day clocked the winds at 78 mph. but they said they were probably much higher but they lost their tracking ability so there wasn't any way to say if they were or not.

We still don't have our Cable back on yet which is a bit of an inconvenience but hey, we only lost a few branches from our fir trees and had our power back on relatively quickly so I am not going to complain. It is a blessing that nothing worse happened at our place or my mom's and for that we thank the Lord.

Let's just hope that as 2008 progresses there won't be any more repeats of this historic storm.