Interesting day

It’s been an interesting day, as in the Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”

Morgan spent the night away from home last night and returned this morning to find the PVC pipe that supplies water to her master bathroom toilet fractured sometime during her absence and flooded her house with about 6” of water.

She called her insurance carrier and a ServiceMaster crew was on the scene in short order, but their work was interrupted by a spectacular once-in-a-decade windstorm that swept through the area doing millions of dollars worth of damage and knocking out power pretty much everywhere.

The straight-line winds, which had the force of an EF1 tornado, in the opinion of one TV weatherman, shredded Morgan’s privacy fence and damaged her roof.

Our power went out at 1:11 p.m. during a torrential downpour. Fortunately for us, we had no wind damage other than a yard littered with small branches and leaves.

It wasn’t until about 6 p.m. that I discovered a voicemail from one of the tenants of our downtown office building saying they had storm damage. I called her and learned the wind ripped their front door off of its hinges. They managed to secure it for the night and I have a crew scheduled to meet them when they open at 7:30 a.m. to make repairs.

Likewise, I filed a claim with the insurance carrier to send an adjuster to document this and any other storm damage to the building.

Happily, none of us is injured, but thousands of trees are down and traffic was hideously snarled for hours because the traffic signals in town were knocked out. The winds were strong enough to derail a train south of town and blew over several semitrailer trucks and utility poles.

I was about to fire up the generator – our neighbors had their generator running when I came back from my dinner at Subway – when the power came back on about 7:30 p.m.

I suppose I should be there when the repair crew arrives at our office building, just in case there is more damage to deal with.