Tornado!?

It was an eventful first week of summer for us here.

We took the family camping for the first weekend out of school, returned Sunday morning to host a Lag Baomer party for our local Chabad, spent Monday cleaning up, and then woke up Tuesday morning to 80mph winds and the tornado siren screaming us to safety at 5:40am.

The biggest issues locally were a single house that burned to the ground due to a lightening strike, about a dozen trampolines scattered hundreds of yards from their designated spots on cars, on top of partially collapsed fences, cars and other unfortunate areas and about 200 trees downed in various states of destruction. Most of the town was without power for 4 days, internet for the same amount of time, and it didn’t stop raining much of the week, inhibiting the clean up.

Needless to say, things are a mess around here.

At Salt Ranch, we are blessed that no humans or animals were injured during the storm, and our biggest damage was our hoop house and chicken run.

Our “farmhands” were both off on Tuesday because of the storm, so despite the wet conditions, we got to work clearing the bulk of the tree from the structure. This took us ALL DAY. It created a muddy mess, but we were able to get the tree cleared, disassemble the hoop house and rehang the door so that the chickens can still have a small run for the mornings and evenings when they are confined from free ranging.

We still have a long way to repairing it back to its former glory, but at least it is functional, which is more than I can say for some of my neighbors and all of the trampolines in Sunnyvale that weren’t properly anchored!

More on the repairs as it dries up and we can get equipment in to lift that 1,000+ lb tree trunk from the roof!