Wind "Event"

*FYI- This is kind of a novel.*

The month of December came in like a lion!  

The night before, we heard and saw the weather forecast.  High wind warnings.  They were calling it a "wind event."  So, we brought in our garbage cans, a few of our Christmas decorations, and I prayed for no property damage that night.  I woke a few times in the night to sound of LOUD gusting winds but always managed to fall back to sleep quickly.  Dan was up for good around 4:30, but we finally got out of bed around 7:30 am. Our power was out but, thankfully, our house was still warm and my prayer was answered-- no damage.  I was supposed to go to the local elementary school that morning to do some reading tutoring.  I called the school, they had power, so they said to come if I could get there safely.  Since our power was out, Dan opened our garage manually and I went.  I drove down the main road of our ward and surprisingly didn't see very much damage.  A fence down (it was already hanging on for dear life before the storm) and a swamp cooler had blown off a roof.  When Dan got home from work that evening, he went around assessing the needs and property damage of ward members.  We were both quite surprised to learn there was a LOT more damage than we first thought, mostly in people's back yards. We are so thankful that none of the 15+ pine trees in our back yard came down; one benefit to having a good portion of them being dead and mostly bare, I guess :)

The weather man explained this "wind event" like this: Wind usually comes down the canyons with localized high winds right at the mouths.  This wind event, for some reason, came over the tops of the mountains and down the other side like a pinewood derby car or a waterfall.  Davis County happened to be in what they called the "crash zone."  The gusts were recorded at 80-90 mph here in Bountiful and were fairly sustained for 8+ hours.  

Here's some of the damage JUST in our ward/neighborhood area.  I didn't take any of these pictures myself.  I've borrowed some from friends (thanks Melissa M., Jessica M. and Mike J.) and I've taken some from the websites of local news outlets.  

Huge pine trees down everywhere!  

Three houses down from us.

Right across from our church parking lot.

In the church overflow parking lot

In a lady's yard that I visit teach they had two trees down that miraculously didn't touch their house (broke their fence though).  It looks like this is after they've already done quite a bit of clean up.  The big thing in the foreground is an uprooted stump.  

In another lady's yard that visit teaches me.  

Some of the clean up piles- easily 6-7 feet high.  

Another ward member's vinyl fence blown out.

This particular house in our ward had about 20+ trees down.  If you can click and enlarge the photo you'll see a sign she posted that said, "Free 60 ft Christmas trees."  :) 

 A panoramic shot of her backyard

 Some of our ward/stake members working together cleaning up. Miraculously enough, this yard had three huge pine trees come down and fill the entire backyard, sparing the house and both sheds. Absolutely amazing!

 Same backyard

This was Dan's sister's next door neighbor's house.  A tree blew over and the roots picked up and tipped over the old truck that was parked under it.  

This was from one of the news websites.  

This was a sign blown out in Centerville, our neighboring city to the north.  They had 102 mph wind gusts and declared a state of emergency.  

As seen previously, most of the debris was stacked up in the home owner's parking strip for the city to come and collect as they could. However, as we were going to bed on Saturday night we saw that there was another high wind warning for Sunday night similar to the "wind event" on December 1st. Dan had an early meeting with the Stake Presidency which was cancelled due to receiving direction from Church officials to cancel all meetings, except sacrament meeting. He was then tasked to begin mobilizing the ward brethren in an effort to get all debris and the remaining fallen trees chopped up and taken to the Bountiful City Landfill.  City officials willingly opened the city dump so all the waste could be put somewhere safe where it wouldn't become dangerous flying debris during the newly forecast wind storm.  Though he felt just a little uncomfortable wearing tattered and sap-covered work clothes, Dan and many others enjoyed receiving permission to wear jeans to church.  :) (sorry, no pictures)

A panoramic shot of the city dump

The line to the dump that Sunday was miles long! The city eventually opened up 2-3 alternate dump sites to take some of the burden off of the dump. 

It was incredible to compare the landfill pre/post disaster. We heard that many city dumps across Davis County received the same amount of "green" waste in that one weekend that they normally receive in a YEAR. For instance, the Layton dump usually takes in 12 tons of green waste in a year; that weekend they received over 15 tons of green waste! Also, it took thousands of volunteers a weekend to do what would have taken Bountiful City 3 months to accomplish.

It was amazing to see the response from men and women, young and old, throughout South Davis County respond to our leaders' direction. Dan said that he would be chest-deep in branches at a pile and within 10-15 minutes, 2-3 trucks and trailers would show up with people from all around the Stake and the huge pile would be gone. A great testament to all of us of the feelings of togetherness and selflessness that brings a group of otherwise total strangers together united in a common purpose.

Another silver lining to this disaster was that we quickly learned where we are lacking in our own emergency preparedness...i.e. alternate source of heat, access to clean water, food, etc. Let's hope Santa wants to drop a generator down our chimney :)  Our power was our for almost 24 hours which eventually dropped our house temperature down to 53*.  Thankfully, Dan's parents' power came back on long before ours so we had a nice warm place to sleep and rest until late the next morning (Thanks M and D!).

What a way to ring in the Christmas season!