A Little Breezy in Pasadena

So, we had a little windstorm this week. Wednesday night I was down at Cottage for a meeting and it wasn’t windy at all. However, as my friend Julia and I headed closer to home after the meeting we saw the wind picking up. I remembered, when we hit the Hill exit on the freeway, that I’d read reports of high winds expected. I’d forgotten. As we headed up Hill, it was like a different world — trees had already fallen over into the street, debris was everywhere. As she dodged another tree, Julia said, “This is crazy. I’m expecting zombies to come running down the street at any moment.”

Turns out we had 80-100 mph winds that night, a very rare occurrence for us. They rattled our windows — blowing two of them open — and whipped outdoor furniture, branches, palm fronds, leaves, etc. all over the neighborhood. We fared OK in the end — a few branches came off one of our giant oaks, a few more came off our neighbor’s giant pine (luckily we had moved our cars out from under it) and we had quite a bit of debris around, but no real damage. We did lose power from Wednesday night to Friday morning and phone/internet/TV service was out until Saturday afternoon.

Here’s what the driveway looked like the next morning. The trash cans had quite an adventure.

Wind aftermath

Wind aftermath

A tree across the street broke.

Tree across the street

Our patio furniture took a beating and the barbecue cover flew off.

Patio table overturned

Not all of our neighbors fared as well as we did. This giant tree is across the street from Julia’s house, two blocks away from us. It took out three cars.

Broken tree two blocks away

Crushed car

Crushed car

The kids got into the act of helping with the cleanup. Here’s Ezra with Julia’s daughter, Sadie.

Sadie and Ezra

And Finn.

Finn

Ezra and I took a walk early this morning and took some pictures of the devastation. They’ve cleared a lot of the tree away, so now we could see the cars underneath. Pretty awful.

Smashed car

Smashed car

This tree about three blocks away from us was totally uprooted, as were hundreds of others around town.

Uprooted tree

It took out a block wall on the way down.

Crushed wall

All in all, we are feeling extremely lucky.