The wind began to switch

Well if any of you live in Colorado, you already know that we had some interesting weather yesterday. We had about four tornados touchdown within a 60 mile area. One of which touched down 5 miles from our house, near the Southlands Mall. CRAZY!! I've been close to tornados before but not for a long time, I can't really remember the last time I had to take shelter.. I think I lived in Iowa at the time.
It happened so fast too, I was watching the news one minute just incase we did need to take shelter, and then the next minute Mikael is calling me on the phone telling me to get in the basement because the funnel cloud was like 10 blocks from us. One of his coworkers husband lives near us and was seeing it first hand, and called his wife at work. The news still was just reporting a T-storm warning for our area. So I grabbed Maile and we spent the next 45 min in the basement. Where I learned that we really need a radio down there or if I was smarter i would have grabbed the lap top, but oh well, we did have a working TV and DVD player so we watched us some Finding Nemo.. "just keep swimming, just keep swimming".

Luckily we didn't sustain any damage except for our rubarb plant, and some of my flowers, but just down the street from us was a different story.

This is section of fence blown down and then flipped over from the other side of the road.

This is over by the Southlands Mall where the tornando actually touched down, their windows were blown out and the garage doors as you can see are tore up.

This is a building over at the school 10 blocks from us. The roof was torn off this storage shed, and in the tennis court you can see part of the sheet metal wrapped around the fence post

This section of fence was on top of the hill way above the street, not sure if the paint on the fire hydrant was like that before or not.. oh and the snow is actually the mega hail we had some of it was an inch in diameter.. ouch!

This was a copper sign that was tore off it's hinges, and flung across and down the street. it was a huge section too.. can't tell the size from the picture but it was pretty substantial.


I suddenly feel like watching the Wizard of Oz.. I've had the song in my head all day.. "The wind began to switch, the house to twitch, and suddenly the hinges started to unhitch. Just then the witch to satisfy an itch went flying on her broom stick thumbing for a hitch."

Fortunatley nobody was hurt badly, and just some property damage, and hail damage to cars and roofs. Lets hope thats our last close encounter all summer.