Natural disasters are meant to cause destruction and to break thing apart. Sometimes they end up bringing people together.
In September of 1996 Hurricane Fran swept through my town with the power of mother nature behind it all the way. Fran brought winds that reached speeds of close to 100 miles per hour,tornadoes, and golf ball-sized hail. Needless to say that this storm did a lot of damage. All over the town people did not have any power, could not use their water. I remember how dark everything was without any light.
I was scared but also kind of excited because I had never been in a hurricane before. The thing that scared me the most was the possibility that I would not have a house when I woke the next morning. As my family sat in the living room everything was silent except for the loud claps of thunder and the howling wind. I peered out of the window looking at the clouds speeding across the sky frequently being lit up by the bright flashes of lightning. As I looked out the window I noticed that a 110foot tall poplar tree was slowly making its way down to my roof. I told my step-dad about the tree and he decided it would be best if we did not stay in the house.
So we made a break for our cars and drove to my step-dads shop which was only two miles away. The drive did not take two minutes, it seemed more like ten because of the rain and wind we encountered while on the road. That night I could not sleep. I stayed up and watched the storm devastate the town. I never in my life have ever seen such an example of raw natural power.
The storm seemed like a giant hand that just picked up objects and threw them across the street, and took trees and bent them like they were no more than wet pasta noodles. Well, that next morning is one I will not forget. I walked out the building I was in to the sight of downed trees and power lines. I even saw cars that were either spun around some how or just plain moved from where they were the night before.
As I started the drive back to my house I decided to take the long way so I could the damage the storm had caused. As I drove down highway 98all I could see were snapped trees, dangling telephone lines and debris laying all over the road. As I turned into my neighborhood it was to my amazement that the damage wasn’t that bad. As I kept driving it seemed that every other street looked like it got hit harder.
Eventually I got to my street, and without a doubt, it was the worse one out of the entire neighborhood. There was no pavement to be seen on my street because it was covered in a blanket of leaves and wood. I just sat in my truck at the stop sign and looked out my window in shock with my jaw in my lap. I turned onto the street and pulled up to my house. This time my jaw hit the floor. The only part of my house I could see was the roof, which had a tree laying on top of it.
The rest of my yard had been covered in downed trees laying on top of each other. From what I heard a tornado jumped around my neighborhood but it seemed to like my part a little bit more. After the shock of what happened started to go away, my family and I started the cleanup project. We gathered some axes and a chainsaw to cut the trees away from my house.
After about a couple of hours or so we looked at the mess once again and it seemed as if we didn’t cut one piece of wood. That is when it happened. People from my street started walking up with every ax and chainsaw there was available. We looked like a bunch of lumberjacks going to town on a forest. We worked on that wood through the whole morning and almost the whole afternoon.
Once all the trees were cut and moved in pile to be picked up everyone stood in the road to see the accomplishment we achieved working as one. Strangely enough we still couldn’t see the house.
