Natural disaster in the Midwest...

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It is more like the facts-of-life. The Midwest gets hit by tornadoes and California gets hit by earthquakes. In 2008, a series of tornadoes tore up my property. It destroyed many of my large trees, about 100 of them. Many were hardwoods like oak trees. Others were soft woods like black walnuts. Some it snapped in two like twigs others were simply uprooted. Imagine trees a foot and a half in diameter snapped in two like a twig. But that is what tornadoes do.

/\They can always try again.When I was a kid one hit our street on Easter Sunday.A few years later one went down the same street and tossed a huge pine on the roof of my old house.Luckily I had moved.

This would be nice.A tornado proof house,rather pricey.
https://www.ky3.com/content/news/Tornad ... 00021.html

/\Actually not a bad idea.Plus if you get desperate and hungry you can eat them,they usually have enough preservatives in them to keep for years.

A couple days ago (during the night of 23 May 2019), a small EF-1 tornado came close to Washington DC. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) immediately got on her Instagram account and began to lecture the nation on dangers of global warming and pushed for her Green New Deal. Mind you this was only a tornado warning. The tornado didn’t even strike Washington D.C., rather it touched down in a nearby Maryland county instead. She is really like a very young child afraid of the dark. Not only does she not understand science, she doesn’t even know U.S. history.

From 1775-1783, the Revolutionary War was the catalyst for American independence. But then less than 30 years later the U.S. was again at war with the British Empire. This event was known as the War of 1812. James Madison was the 4th President of the United States. We were a very young nation at the time. And in 1814 our young nation was about to be ended.

On Tuesday, 23 August 1814, Washington D.C. was in chaos. The British were coming. The enemy was in a full march towards the city. The original Declaration of Independence, the Articles of the Confederation, the Federal Constitution, many treaties and laws as enrolled, along with George Washington’s Commission as Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Revolution were placed in coarse linen bags and spirited away first to a mill over the Potomac River, about 3 miles from Georgetown and then to Leesburg, a small town in Virginia about 35 miles from Washington D.C. The loss of these documents to the British would have deeply blackened our disgrace. If they had been captured and deposited in the Tower of London, it would illustrate the British triumph.

On the 24th, Dolley Madison was in the White House, which was almost deserted. She was trying to save what could be saved. The enemy was closing in. Two messengers covered in dust came to bid her fly. She wouldn’t leave until a large portrait of George Washington was secured. This was not going to be a trophy for the captors. Mrs. Madison, with a carving knife in her hand, stood by while French John and others strove to detach the picture uninjured from its heavy external gilt frame and preserve it whole on the inner wooden work, by which it was kept distended and screwed to the wall. When it was safe, she fled.

Towards the evening, the British troops led by Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn marched on Washington, D.C. and set most of the city aflame. The public buildings were all burned including [the White House], the U.S. Capital, the Library of Congress, [and the U.S. Treasury]. During the evening Mrs. Madison sitting at an open window gazing on the lurid flames and listening to the hoarse murmurs of the smoldering city, while several hundred disorderly militia around the house aggravated the din and begrimed the gloomy scene. The whole region was filled with panic struck people, terrified scouts roaming about and spreading alarm that the enemy were coming from Washington and Alexandria and that there was safety nowhere.

On the 25th, Dolley Madison traveled to a tavern 16-miles from Georgetown, where she was to meet up with her husband, President James Madison. About noon, the air was charged with the two-fold electricity of panic and of a storm. The horizon was overcast, the heavens portentously black, thunder muttered, forked lightning flashed, hurricane blasts announced the tornado which soon broke forth with tropical fury, desolating many miles round.

As if out of nowhere, the skies unleashed great fury as a tornado ripped though Washington D.C. The clouds began to swirl and the winds kicked up. A tornado formed in the center of the city and headed straight for the British on Capitol Hill. The twister ripped buildings from their foundations and trees up by the roots. British cannons were tossed around by the winds. Several British troops were killed by falling structures and flying debris. The rain continued for two hours, dousing the flames.

Terror was the order of the day and incubus of the night for both the Americans and the British. The storm drove the enemy from the capital. And the heavy rains helped to put the fire out.

Too bad there are not more Dolley Madison’s in the world today. People with a little courage in their hearts.

Historic flooding in Fort Smith,Ar.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/5newsonlin ... m-nws/amp/

But then if you go back a little further in time, there were several great floods along the Mississippi.

For example the Great Mississippi Flood of 1874:
Heavy spring rains caused the Mississippi River to overflow, breaching levees and flooding enormous swathes of the Lower Mississippi Valley. The flooding began in February and only began to recede on May 20th. According to the New Orleans Daily Picayune of May 3rd, thirty-one of Louisiana's fifty-three parishes (home to some 375,000 people) were entirely or partially underwater. The Picayune also reported that breaches at Hushpakana[sic.] and Bolivar, Mississippi, had "transformed the Yazoo Valley into an inland lake." Mayor Louis A. Wiltz of New Orleans published a circular on May 30th addressed to "the Mayors of thirty-four large American cities" seeking contributions of cash and provisions for relief efforts. In the circular, the Flood of 1874 was described as the highest on record. It also included the observations of former U.S. Surveyor General for Louisiana William J. McCulloh, who estimated that a total of 12,565,060 acres had been flooded across Louisiana (8,065,000), Mississippi (2,500,000), and Arkansas (2,000,000).

Source: Mississippi River floods

But perhaps the greatest recorded flood on the Mississippi was the flood of 1543. Hernando de Soto's party was passing through a village at the confluence of the Mississippi River and Arkansas River on March 18. The ensuing flood only allowed passage by canoe and inundated fields surrounding the town. Another source said: Explorer Hernando Desoto encountered a flood on the river near Memphis, Tennessee that extended over 40 days and likely extended to the lower reaches of the river. Chronicled by Garcilaso de la Vega. Another source said: A great flood occurred on the Mississippi River on April 20. The river was 40 leagues (120 miles) wide.

I still wonder if something could be invented that could reverse climate change artificially.

Large, destructive tornado strikes Dayton as severe storms ravage Ohio

After living through the effects of a large tornado, I have a little insight on the subject. The next step is recovery. Many people falsely believe that the government will step in. But generally that assumption is wrong. The primary people that aid in the recovery are the actual individuals that were affected by the catastrophe. They are the ones on the front lines of the recovery effort.

Many who were affected by the tornadoes are assessing the damage, taking photos as a record, getting estimates for repair and contacting their insurance companies. The other group that are front line personnel are the power companies. Life comes to a grinding halt when you do not have electricity. After a catastrophe hits, the electrical companies mobilize an army of utility workers from around the state and even from other states to aid in the recovery effort.

When we were hit by a tornado, even though the tornado missed the house, I had close to a hundred large trees down. The closest I could get to my house was a quarter mile away. I left my car and made my way to my home, crawling over downed trees. After around 15 minutes I arrived at my house and assessed the damage. I looked around in a state of shock and thought where do I begin. I needed a goal, something to latch onto, a plan to pull me out of the shock state. I thought if I could only clear my driveway of trees so that my wife could drive up to the house by the time she would arrive home in 5 hours, life would start to return back to normal. So that became the first phase of the recovery effort for me. I went to my pole barn and pulled out my chainsaw and went down my driveway where 3 or 4 large trees were completely blocking the driveway and I began to cut a path through the trees. A neighbor kid came by with his chainsaw and joined me. Together we cleared a path. That was the first baby step in the recovery process.

Needless to say we were without power. The thick power lines were wrapped around the tree tops on the ground like a massive snake. Power lines look like massive steel cables. The emergency power crews work similar to a medical triage (the assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number of patients or casualties). So the first thing that the power crews do is an assessment. They visit the area and assess damage. There were tens of thousands of people without power after the tornadoes hit. In some cases, a one hour fix could restore power to a thousand homes. In other cases, it might take a week of effort to restore power to one home. So you can guess how priorities are decided. Also there are other high priority needs, such as if a hospital is taken off line. Anyways a quick assessment told me that it would take about a month before I had electricity again.

So my next step was to shorten that time window. When my wife got home we walked around the property. It was fairly easy to see why our power was out. The power lines were strewn all over my front yard. So I devised another plan. I went down to the driveway and divided the area into 4 quadrants. On one side of the driveway were 2 quadrant and on the other side two more. I decided we would completely clean up the debris from the 2 quadrants where the power lines were run. So the next morning we began to work. We worked from dawn to dusk. It was hot and humid. I would go through around a shirt an hour. They were completely drenched after an hour. We completed one quadrant and then the next. We tore the branches from the trees and created around 10 burn piles that were over 10 feet tall in height. And when they dried over the next few days we set these large bonfires off with flames that touched the sky. After two days of clearing we had two quadrants free. My wife contacted a friend in the power company, they came out an looked at the damage and restrung the power lines. So our effort resulted in reducing the down time by a little over 3 weeks.

Now even though the power lines were restrung, that didn't mean that we had electricity. It is not all that easy. Many people were without electricity and resources needed to be shared. So the power came on and we were overjoyed but 2 hours later it was off again. This was intermittent brownouts. I noticed a pattern. The electricity was on for around 2 hours per day from 2AM to 4AM. So that meant another plan. We went to bed when the sun went down. No electricity meant no light. I turned on the lights to our bedroom even though there was no electricity. When the lights came on we got up and immediatley went to work. They were like automatic alarm clocks. We compressed a whole day of activity into those two hours. We cooked hot meals, washed the laundry, took hot baths, dried the clothing, watched TV, accessed the internet, charged up batteries. Eventually after many many days the power suddenly just stayed on and our life became normal again.

Well not completely normal. I still had hundreds of trees that were down. It was literally like a war zone. I spent the next year cutting up firewood. It produced about a 12 year supply to heat my home during the winter months.