… About the Winds That Took Away Our Shed

So, did you hear about the 64 m.p.h. winds that took the roof off the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Louisville last night? They also took away our shed!

Around 6:45 p.m. (Thursday, July 19) I was looking out a kitchen window into the backyard. It had already been raining for a little while but the wind picked up and it started raining harder. Rob was in the basement dealing with a slow outside drain that can flood the basement if we don’t keep an eye on it. I noticed the garbage and recycling cans started getting blown around, but that happens during every moderate-to-strong windstorm.

The view from our back door right after the storm had passed.

The door that went over the fence and landed against our neighbor’s garage. (It’s back in our yard in the photo.)

Shed, meet the fig tree. Fig tree, meet the shed. (And look how close to the garden the shed landed!)

Our hose reel was in pieces but went back together and is as good as new! It was dragged about 10-15 feet into the yard.

Some top branches were broken (unfortunate since they had blossoms and baby tomatoes) but overall they look pretty good.

Knocked over but not broken!

The sky at 8:51 p.m.

The sky at 8:52 p.m.

The sky at 8:57 p.m.

Notice the eerie glow? Don’t get so distracted you don’t see how tidy the yard was when we finished!

But then I saw our big deck box moving around and our (new!) hose reel sliding from the driveway into the backyard, with the hose still attached to the house. Then our patio table (glass-topped, with a closed umbrella sticking out of it) blew over on its side, then stood back upright, then blew over on the opposite side and then finally stood back upright again.

At this point the wind was blowing the rain horizontally and I couldn’t see very far into the yard anymore (like a blizzard whiteout). It got so crazy For a minute or two I couldn’t see anything, and when it calmed down a little I could see some colorful things in the back of our yard. I was trying to figure out what I was seeing and then I realized what I wasn’t seeing: our shed! The colorful pile of stuff was everything in the shed, just sitting on the shed base — much of it undisturbed. We got the shed right after we moved in, so it’s six years old. It’s one of those Rubbermaid Big Max sheds and it made it through every other bad storm of the past six years fine: the ice storm, the Hurricane Ivan (?) winds, the recent hailstorm… all of them! The majority of the shed ended up wedged in our fig tree, which is the best place it could have landed — otherwise it could have crushed the fence of the neighbor behind us or hit and damaged something else. Rob hates the fig tree anyway!

By 7 p.m. the winds had stopped and the rain had slowed down. Through all of this, as I was trying to digest everything that had just happened, all I could think about was the garden! Fortunately, and amazingly, it weathered the storm (literally and figuratively) pretty well. One of the tomato cages was pushed over, as were the two big broccoli plants, but they weren’t broken so I was able to stand them back up and prop them up with sticks/small tomato cages. We put our mower and trimmer in our neighbor’s garage (thanks Keith!), who had found one of the shed doors up against the side of his garage. It had a 3-4 foot metal pole sticking out of it (the “hinge pin” that was ripped out when the door flew off, we suppose) and it’s amazing it didn’t impale anything — or anyone! And did I mention there’s a 4 ft. tall chain link fence between our yards that the door had to make it over to get into his yard? Yowza!

So it looks like the only real casualty was the shed itself. Most of it just came apart rather than actually breaking, but there were some screwed-together sections that were ripped apart. I suppose it could be put back together, but we’re pretty sure it would never be as sturdy as it used to be. We need to figure that out, or look into getting something new, but we’re taking a break from figuring that out for at least a day or two. We spent two hours last night cleaning up the backyard, moving a bunch of stuff into the basement, taking apart the rest of the shed pieces and propping some of them up around the things still on the shed base — so we just didn’t feel like worrying about messing with it today. (By the way, while we were working outside the sky was doing some crazy things. Everything got really pinky-orange, like we were looking through colored lenses. There was some crazy lightning, too. It was all cool but spooky!)

During all this our power was out, too. It went out just before 7 p.m. and came back on around 1:30 a.m. — for about one minute. Then it went off again and I expected (hoped) it would come right back on, but it didn’t. It finally came back on at 4:20 a.m. Believe it or not the house didn’t get that hot, but the outside temp really cooled down after the storm. That was one of many lucky breaks — yeah, it stinks that we had a shed-splosion, but at least the roof is still on the house!

Here are some extra photos not included above (click the image to see it larger):

	The shed got pretty close to whacking the fence of the neighbor behind us — instead it got wedged in the fig tree.
Some racks and things are still attached to the walls — and ceramic pots and other breakables didn’t move.	The new “shack” (it’s no longer a shed) all nicely put together.
The tidy “shack” got knocked down by the wind about 30 seconds after we got the last piece arranged.