The Twin Calamities

[dorchadas]

Yesterday at around 2:30 p.m., a tornado alert lit up sashagee's phone. Not that long after, my mother texted me to ask me about the storm that was coming, and when I checked Dark Sky, there was a solid wall barrelling down from the west toward us. Over the course of fifteen minutes, the sky went from a bit cloudy to twilight, the wind picked up, and rain started to fall. sashagee left the sun nook and all its windows and went into the office, which has a single east-facing window shielded by an overhang, and waited it out.

Where I am, it wasn't too bad. When we went out shopping after it was over there was barely even any puddles on the ground, but we got lucky. There was a tornado within a mile of us that touched down and went out over the lake, and a nearby street was completely blocked by a downed tree. My boss, who lives within a mile, still doesn't have power this morning. A bunch of my friends also don't have power, and one mentioned $300 of food that's spoiled. smtemp snapped a picture of a steeple at a building at Wheaton College having collapsed, and seloy had some parts of her backyard blow away in the high winds. With all those west-facing windows I have, I got away really lucky.

Also yesterday, sashagee got a text from her manager saying that her downtown workplace was closed due to damage from looting. This was because the police shot someone the day before and their body cameras were off, so while they claim that they were fired on first, well, police constantly lie about everything. Initial reports were that the police had shot a child (that's how I first heard it), so people nearby were very angry. They fought with police, other people showed up downtown and looted some stores, and the next morning the mayor suspended public transit and raised the bridges again.

I'm getting really tired of the mayor just deciding to disrupt life for everyone on a whim. Raising the bridges and shutting down transit should not be the first response to any situation.

When we went shopping yesterday, everywhere corporate closed early--probably heeding the call of some exec who doesn't live anywhere near Chicago to close all the stores--but the locally-owned Middle Eastern Grocery Store was open through the storm, so we got a bunch of hummus and pita and came back for dinner. We're mostly unaffected by any of this, here on our particular part of the far north side.

2020 really is a year.

Comments

[tuulentupa]

Wow, you really have a bit too much of all kinds of nastiness to deal with this year. :/

(And a bit late, but it was good to hear that sashagee didn't have the plague.)

[dorchadas]

It has been...a year.

But thank you! That's at least one thing off our plates.

[corvi]

Huh, I wouldn't have thought Chicago got tornados. Not that I had any good reason for thinking that, I just thought they were a more Southish phenomenon. Glad you and yours are okay, too much going on there.

[dorchadas]

Honestly I never think of Chicago getting tornadoes either, but it's not actually based on anything...as Monday afternoon shows.

But tornadoes are pretty common in Illinois. There was a major one when I was a kid that destroyed Plainfield High School, about forty miles away from Chicago.