Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Storm

The weather provided a pretty interesting small group last night! We (Crystal, Corey, Steph, Jacqui, Sara, and I) met up at Barnes & Noble in West Dundee and within a few minutes of starting our study we noticed a pretty dramatic shift in the weather. It went from rainy to rainy, flashy, and blustery. Steph got a call from Mark warning us that the tornado sirens were going off in Elgin and the storm was headed to Dundee. Jacqui quickly took off for home and Crystal called home to check on Scott and the kids. Scott reported the sirens were starting up in East Dundee as well. A book store employee announced that "tornadoes" had been spotted in the area and advised everyone to move away from the windows.


Being the clever girls that we are we decided we could do better than just get away from the windows and headed to the ladies room. From the safety of the bathroom we could still hear the thunder and the rain pounding on the mall roof. Soon the management had moved the rest of the customers from the store into the bathroom hallways and we could hear all the excited chatter outside the Ladies room door. As we hunkered down and waited for the all clear the power went out a couple of times, but gradually the noise outside the building seemed to subside, and then the noise outside our bathroom subsided, and then a friendly head popped into the bathroom to tell us that it was safe to come out.

After the worst of the storm had passed and as we finished up our small group the power went out briefly a couple more times, and when I left the mall I saw that the power was completely out on the other side of the street. The drive home wasn't too bad but there was a 10 mile stretch on 59 with almost all lights were out. The rain wasn't heavy but lighting provided a pretty constant show off to the North. At home there is a big tree limb down in our driveway, but nothing got hit and we have power so we got off easy compared to a lot of people. ComEd estimates that 200,000 people lost power because of the storm.

Pictures stolen from NBC5 website :)

1 comment:

janettsue said...

Wow! Who knew the mall could be so exciting.