A tornado spawned essentially on top of my house in June and applied enough torque to fuck up my foundation. One corner of my house is coming off now. I’m fighting my homeowners insurance to cover it and I have a foundation expert coming out tomorrow to give me estimates for the costs of repairs. My cousin from ohio knows all about real estate, so he gave me and my mom so many tips for how to get the insurance to cover it. I requested a new adjuster for a second opinion yesterday and one should be contacting me next week.
This whole thing has me freaking out and more severe storms have rolled through and made it worse. The whole right side of my house has shifted on top of the one corner coming off. Found more cracks in the wall of the finished basement today. We had a crazy storm yesterday, which probably cause the cracks.
Worst: Driving through a large Midwest city in the US on the freeway. Started raining. NBD. Then it got a lot harder. The wind really picked up fast. I’ve been around gust fronts and the like for thunderstorms before, this was unlike anything I’ve been through before. It got wild, fast. Tree parts and other debris started blowing past, it looked like what you’d think a tornado would, but it was far too widespread. Then the crazy thing…along with the wind, rain, and debris, the visibility dropped to near zero with a fog or mist in the span of a minute. We had to pull over and stop with everyone else, nobody could see for a few minutes. I have never seen that happen before, the rapid and violent change to weather and visibility over such a large area.
Coolest: Driving over the western High Desert in the US. Got caught up in a snowstorm with lots of wind. Found a safe place to spend the night after some white-knuckle driving for an hour or two. Plenty of vehicles pushed by wind or slid off the road, we were some of the only stupid ones left driving. No place to park safely, not enough gas for the rest of the night to keep warm. Don’t want to be the dead ones found with CO poisoning by the highway patrol the next day. Anyway, woke up the next day and it was crystal clear, literally. The air was full of fine ice crystals blowing in the wind. The bright sun had a huge halo and cross like a “+” along with some other tangential arcs that felt both close and far away to us at ground level. I’m sure folks in colder climes see these, but it was a new one to me. Pretty wild to see.