After a nice, but too short summer vacation, I headed back to Iowa ready to hang out with friends I hadn’t seen in a long time and do all the regular work before I headed to Michigan for our next project. Apparently life had different plans. Around 4:30am on Monday I was woken up by a weird black and white light outside, almost like a strobe light. I was laying in my bed watching it for a little bit and then I thought to myself maybe I should move in case the window busted. Right when I thought this, one of my friends knocked on my door and told me that we were evacuating into the tunnels. The storm was so bad that peoples windows were being blown out and the wind was so strong that it was sucking people’s window air conditioning units out. After we evacuated and came back out it was surreal.
Our campus had been hit by a straight line wind storm. The main way that it is different is that in a straight line wind, the wind all blows the same way, which is why all of the trees and debris landed the same way, as opposed to a tornado where you have a funnel. Unfortunately our sleepy town inIowagot hit. HARD. There were downed trees everywhere and no one in town had power. On our campus, one of the administrative buildings had the roof ripped off of it and the dorm I lived in had major damage.
Speaking of that dorm, let me tell you what happened. A piece of debris hit the roof and made a hole in it. The debris then hit the water pipe for the sprinkler system which then busted. Water began pouring our of the 2nd floor ceiling and destroying almost everything in the building. Some people lost everything they brought with them. Thankfully my room was on the other side of the building and while my room did flood and I lost a few items, overall the damage was minimal.
Having this happen was something that I would have never thought would’ve happened and am still a little shocked by it. Thankfully no one got hurt.
This building used to have a roof
This is where I used to live
We used to have huge trees..not so much any more
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