“The Storm”-A Year Ago Today

We all learned a lesson one year ago today.  That lesson is that Mother Nature controls us. A year ago today, the area was buffeted with extreme high winds, and some feel tornadoes, which ripped through the area with a vengeance.  It was dark but when the storm hit you could tell it was going to  be a bad one. Tree limbs were striking my house which caused me to take shelter in my basement to "ride it out". If you did likewise, you know your mind was going a thousand miles a second thinking about all the possibilities that could happen. When things settled down, I came upstairs thanking God I wasn't hurt or the house wasn't damaged like I thought it would be.  Once I realized the severity of the storm, I tried to get to work around 1:30 that morning. It was ugly.  Trees and power lines were down everywhere  making my trek to the station difficult.  A trip that normally takes 7 minutes took me almost 30 minutes to navigate around all kinds of debris.  Once at the station, I found we were without power for all of our stations leaving me with a helpless feeling of not being able to relay information to people who really needed that information.  It was extremely frustrating to wait for the power to come on. I was not the only person frustrated, there were thousand without power and they were without it for as much as five days in some cases. It's funny how we accept things as being normal until our "normal" gets interrupted.  We are so conditioned to having electricity that when it goes off it seems like we can't function.  Looking back, with the massive amount of cleanup that was needed, the City of Quincy did a fabulous job with the clean up and Ameren was on top of  their game to restore the power as quickly as they did a year ago.  To my knowledge, no one was killed from the storm which was amazing. It's hard to believe it was one year ago today and looking back at it, it was nothing compared to what Joplin, Missouri went and is still going through today.