Day 10.293: Stormed

As evening fell yesterday, we knew a storm was coming bringing heavy rain and strong winds, but we didn't think much more about it than that it would make an autumnal mess that we would have to try to clean up before the Halloween hordes arrive on Tuesday evening.

It turned out that we, along with many in Maine were significantly underestimating this storm.

Overnight, we woke several times to loud bangs, incredibly strong winds and lashing rain. After I was woken up by a phone message that the schools had a two hour delay (they were later closed altogether) I glanced at the weather warnings on my phone:

As dawn broke, we were pretty relieved by what we found - we still had power and although there were a lot of branches in the 1 to 6 ft range and a lot of mess, the immediate impact was our bins and basketball hoop blown over and some chairs that had left the deck:

Then we started to hear what was going on around the state - more than half the people in our county without power and more than half of the electricity company's customers in the 14 out of 16 Maine counties that they were reporting outages for too.

It turned out that in the woods immediately behind the house  several trees had come down:

The bottom right picture shows a huge limb that had planted itself a foot deep in the ground when it fell. We are lucky that we were safely in bed and that all the large trees immediately around the house were able to survive. Others were not so lucky - with damage to cars and homes almost as widespread as the power outages.