Hail Storm of 2018

Last Thursday, we experienced a storm like I have never witnessed before! Christian and I were sitting on the couch talking and admiring our garden when he received a call from a friend in Cowley who said that they had just had walnut sized hail and to get inside if we were outside. Within minutes, the storm hit and it was crazy! We had hail the size of ping pong balls nailing our house. I was sure our windows were going to break they were so big and coming so fast! We watched as they pelted our house. It was SO loud! After the storm passed, we went out to assess the damage.

A couple of the hail we were able to pick up.

 

We went outside to find the our neighborhood totally beat up! There were trees everywhere, dumpsters had been blown over and house had been torn up. It seriously looked like a war zone. We were lucky compared to most in our neighborhood. We were one of only two houses that didn't have windows broken out and most of the houses had holes in their siding (we did not). Everyone in the neighborhood met up and immediately went to work helping board up windows and clean up debris. It was so heartwarming to see everyone outside helping each other out. We truly live in an amazing neighborhood!

Our overturned dumpster (which thankfully had been dumped the day before and didn't have any garbage in it) and large branch in the road.

All the windows on the north side of our house survived breaking, but all the screens were beat to heck and the vinyl around them were beat up too. Christian's truck and his work truck were luckily the only vehicles outside. Both sustained some hail damage to the hood and top. Our personal truck lost a mirror, several broken lights and busted up bug guard and window guards.

 Our garden didn't survive either. Everything was totally beat up! Travis even found one of our little pumpkins with a divet taken out of it!

Our sad little garden!

There was a beautiful rainbow immediately after the storm!

 We cleaned up glass around neighbors houses and boarded up windows until it was too dark to do so. We were without power for several hours.

Our neighbors, the Steenbakkers, seemed to get hit the worst!

The next day, Carson's old 11 year old scout master, got his "snow patrol" (they would go out after big snow storms and shovel for hours) together to go around and be a "debris patrol". They spent several hours cleaning up yards and hauling away tree limbs for some of the elderly in our ward.

Almost done cleaning up our neighbor Bob's yard.

It was so fun to hear about so many people helping others. We truly live in a great community!