Sunday, September 30, 2012

Typhoon Jelawat

This weekend we had another typhoon visit the island. I swear the only times typhoons come are on the weekends! It's crazy! I also feel like we're having a ton of typhoons. This is the 4th one since we've been here in 2 1/2 months. Thankfully typhoon season ends on November 1st, so we only have one more month of this craziness!

We had known since Monday that a typhoon was predicted to hit on the weekend, so we had all week to prepare. However, this typhoon seemed like it was being down played compared to the other typhoons we had this season. There were the normal casual reminders posted by the Base Facebook pages to secure all outdoor items and stock up on food but there was no posts that made this seem like it was going to be a bad typhoon. Especially since the typhoon had already downgraded from a Super Typhoon to just a Typhoon by the time it hit us. Let me tell you, it was the worst typhoon we've experienced! We woke up to the sound of rain pelting our window at 7AM on Saturday. I looked outside and it was crazy windy! The wind and rain kept up until about 11AM; that is when the eye of the storm was over us. It was pretty calm while the eye was over us between 11AM - 1PM. After that, the back end of the storm brought even more crazy wind and rain. We have like a forest of trees behind our house and they were going wild! We also saw trash cans flying all over our neighborhood. At about 3PM, our power went out! Chad was taking a nap at this point, so he doesn't even remember the power going out. Thankfully, it was only out for 20 minutes! Some of the neighborhoods on base had lost power for practically the whole day; we got very lucky! I think that it was about 5PM that the storm had finally passed and things started to calm back down. We had gone in to TCCOR-Recovery, which means we still have to stay in our house but the recovery teams were out picking up damage. Chad and I knew that we probably wouldn't go into TCCOR Storm Watch (where they let us out) until the morning.

People were posting on Facebook pictures of damages around them. There were a lot of damaged cars! There is even a video of a car being picked up by the wind that is posted below. It was crazy! Thankfully our cars are still upright and we saw no damage to our property. Well, Chad did lose one of those rain guards off his window and has a small (he says it's big) dent in the side of his car. But other than that, I'd say we got pretty lucky!




Today we went to drive around to see some of the damages. All we saw were a TON of downed trees and tree branches. They were everywhere, including our yard! We have two tall trees in front of our place that had a bunch of branches ripped off from them and they all landed right in our yard. Perfect! We cleaned a bunch of that up this morning. Typhoons leave our cars with this super nasty grime on them, so we washed our cars today. Everyone and their brother were at the car wash, so we bought the supplies to wash them at home. I for sure thought we wouldn't be able to find everything we needed because that seems how it always happens but we did for once! Yay!

Today's weather was perfect! It was super nice outside and there was a nice breeze so it just made for a perfect day. Chad and I went on a 3.5 mile walk/run tonight. While we were running, Chad found a rain guard exactly like the one that the wind ripped off his car on the ground. He thought for sure it was his, so we ran back to the house to check. Sadly, it wasn't the right one for his car. He was bummed! I just thought that was a funny story :)

No comments:

Post a Comment