Kristin Janz

Not much damage at our place from yesterday’s storm. A few small branches snapped off of trees (and I do mean small; I was debating whether to call them branches or twigs). Fallen leaves, some nuts from the hickory/walnut thing overhanging our backyard. No electrical outages, not even a blip. I was all worried that the power would go out for 3 days or something, and all the food in our fridge and freezer would spoil, so I was experimenting with all these complicated schemes involving turning the fridge/freezer temperature up to maximum cold (our fridge doesn’t have separate controls for the two compartments) to keep things cold longer, freezing big containers of water and blue ice packs so I could turn the fridge into an icebox if the power went out. And so on. Turned out none of it was necessary, and all I managed to do was ruin a bunch of the vegetables I had in there. (Donald wasn’t actually too disappointed by the loss of the large head of CSA romaine lettuce.) Whoever says that you should turn your fridge to maximum cold if you’re worried about the power going out is an idiot. Either that, or they’re not into fresh vegetables all that much. Or they have a higher-quality fridge that won’t freeze their lettuce solid on maximum power. Whatever, don’t try this at home!

There was a lot of damage in other parts of the Boston area, though. Trees down on sidewalks, crushing cars, even going through the roof in at least one case. The bike path west of here was blocked by a fallen tree, near the Trader Joe’s. And it looks like Vermont was hit terribly hard, with massive flooding and road/bridge damage.

We feel very thankful that we got off so easily, but sad that others didn’t.

I left work an hour earlier than I’d intended to today, since the news on the radio was broadcasting a “severe thunderstorm alert” for the Boston area until 8 pm, warning of frequent lightning, violent and destructive winds, and hail.

Well. It had rained for about 15 minutes BEFORE I heard about the thunderstorm alert. But I didn’t encounter any rain at all on the bike ride home, and by 6 or 7 the sun was coming out again.

I was trying to be safe, since the wooded bike path can be quite dangerous in heavy winds and lightning. But I guess weather forecasters have taken to hyping potential summer thunderstorms the same way they treat oncoming winter blizzards.

On Sunday afternoon we had one of the most intense storms I’ve seen since moving to Boston. I was in church during the height of the storm (I’m sure there’s a cliche in there somewhere), but on the bus ride home, once we got into Arlington I started seeing trees down everywhere. One had fallen right on top of someone’s parked car.

The picture above is of the end of the one-way street I live on. Note how a tree has fallen and blocked the entire street, dragging a power line down with it.

My roommates told me that an even bigger tree fell over on the next street. They could hear the Public Works department sawing at it for over an hour after the storm ended, but by the time I got home, most of it had been cleared away. Here’s a picture of the part of the tree that was still standing.

It seems that Arlington was particularly hard hit by the storm, for some reason. Though not as hard hit as southern New Hampshire, which reportedly had a tornado! (The Boston area had a tornado watch, but I don’t think we actually had any tornadoes in Massachusetts.) They had most of the trees cleared off of residential streets by nightfall, but the bike path was still blocked by several downed trees on my Monday morning commute to work. I wish I’d thought to take my camera along. I had to carry my bike over two fallen trees just on the stretch between Lake Street and where it opens up by the soccer fields before Alewife. One of the trees was a willow that must have been at least 18 inches in diameter where it split. I could see the jagged trunk left behind; it broke off about 30 feet above the ground.

I assumed that these trees fell because of the strong winds, but my roommates think it’s because they were struck by lightning. I didn’t see any burn marks, though, and I was under the impression that if the upper limbs of a tree fell off because of a lightning strike, you’d see scorch marks. But I guess I don’t really know enough about it.

I’ve decided that my paranoia about riding my bike in thunderstorms is probably justified. Even if it’s just the 10-minute ride home. After seeing what the bike path looked like on Monday morning.

My roommates said that our cat didn’t like the thunderstorm, and kept meowing at them as if she wanted them to make the noise stop. When that didn’t work, she went and hid under my bed for a few hours.