We had an excellent storm last night. Tornados and everything. We didn’t even know about it (we don’t have TV) until Mason’s parent night at school was canceled. We got in the truck to drive over to the school because it looked like it might rain and the severe weather alert came on the radio.

We were watching the online weather from the basement as a tornado came down the street 1 mile from the farm. That is until the internet went down. As our Colorado friend, Jake said, “You win the geek prize my friend.” I have to agree.

After the bad part passed, we drove down to take a look around. I think everyone else in the county was doing the same. It was still raining pretty hard and the lightning was amazing. We thought the highway to the farm was busy, but when we got to Cooper (pop. 30), we knew why. Everyone was down there looking for the chaos. Well, all they really got to see was a few LARGE downed limbs.

All our buildings are okay. We lost a bit of insulation on a side of the corn crib that we hadn’t finished siding. Our own fault there.

We lost a giant tree, but it needed to come down anyway. Actually, it fell into our brush pile!! Less work for us! Can you see in one of the pictures, the white stick thing in the grass? That used to be a 1″ x 2″ marker for our electric service. It was snapped off at the top and bent over. The roadside grass also has a nice new “crop circle” style pattern.

Our neighbors, the Offenburgers, to the north lost the tops of a couple of their trees. Also, the sides on a bike trail bridge between our farm and the Offenburgers house had fallen over. These sides were built with 4″ x 6″ posts!

I have to say, I was impressed by the acuracy of the television station (KCCI) radar. They were able to pinpoint the tornado’s path down to the cross streets. The weather man also had the guts to tell people to stop calling in complaining about missing their TV shows! They needed spotters to call in tornado and damage sitings. Kudos to you!

However, I was not impressed with their online streaming of the weather. The stream would stop after about 5 minutes. We would have to restart it and THEN listen to another commercial before it would start playing again. Not good when you are trying to figure out how much danger your family is in!