On Tuesday morning, about 7:15 am, Shelby County, TN got hit by a monster storm. It took out massive areas of the grid, thousands of trees, buildings destroyed, and people killed. By today, only a small proportion of the 250,000 homes without electricity had power returned, and the roads are still chaotic in Memphis, with street lights out all over. I tried to get round a closed road, power cables were strewn across it like tangled string - Getting round it proved impossible, because of power lines down all over, trees down, tangled branches blocking roads, bits of houses blocking roads, overturned trailers, cars, trucks, and sheds.

It was a thunderstorm that did this massive amount of damage, with winds in excess of 100 mph recorded in some places. By the time it got the 38 miles east, to my house, it was still blowing strong, damaging both north and south of my property, but thankfully leaving me, my trucks, and my two thousand trees alone. I had a couple of branches break, and mess left by leaves, and twigs blowing around, but nothing like the houses torn from their foundations, the vehicles tossed like toys, or the massive area of tangled powerlines, and torn out trees.

Daily you can see out of state electric company trucks heading to Memphis, followed by telephone company trucks, and tree surgeons.. It is terrible - temperatures are in the 90's, and freezers are thawed out, garbage trucks can't make the rounds, and the roads are clogged. Disease is getting a head start on Memphis this summer.

I am shocked at the amount of damage one storm can do in 5 minutes - it was heading east at 65 miles an hour, so it was over any given location only 5 minutes. It seemed like hours, as my house shook, and the trees strained against it, but 5 minutes was all it took, passing me and going on to topple more trees, take roofs from a dozen more buildings, before it diminished and blew itself out 100 miles east of here.

Theo

 

Is that near the west end of the NC. I'm headed up to the snake (Hwy 129 at the NC/TN border) to ride at the end of this month.

 

Wow, I can only imagine those kinds of storms. Being in Montana, we had what we thought was a bad wind storm the other night but sounds like nothing now. Sorry to hear about it but will be praying for Memphis.

 

I don't remember any wind storm, BTW I am headed up to the ranch, apparently there is a wildfire about to consume everything we own.

 

Saw on the news, there are over 60 fires in the western states.

 

One of them is about 150,000 acres. The only thing that sucks about it is that there is no way to save the stuff. We have insurance that covers stuff like this. All of the expensive equipment is sitting in a preburned area, we set that fire a while ago because tof the big one thats only 20 miles from our ranch. I hope we don't lose the house but there is nothing we can do.