A very scary experience - part 2

(see part 1 here)

I walked through the house taking quick photos with my phone as I took in the mess and realised the power of what had passed through. Part of my brain couldn’t take it in and the other was making sure I had a record for insurance.

There was glass covering the lounge suite and piano, in every room and in any cupboard that the wind had pulled open; leaves and thatching straw was on top of the fridge, stuck on the walls, on the paintings, in the cupboards and in a small fridge that had been sucked open.

This couch was moved by the wind

The curtain comes from the rail above the sliding door, across the far side of the room.

A jacket that was on that fallen coat stand disappeared completely.

Some of the clothes that were on the airer were sucked through the doorway you can see behind, through the house, and out into the garden at the back.

If you zoom in on the poster you will see it’s glass is broken.

Above it was a shard of glass embedded in the wall like a spear.

Items that had been in the first room were now on the floor two rooms away.

This fridge, in the laundry at the back of the house, had its door pulled open.

The pot on the floor marked with an x came from the lounge!

The sugar dispenser next to it came from the kitchen.

The door at the back of the laundry is a roller shutter like a garage door.

That was sucked out of its frame and bent upwards, a bicycle jammed underneath, half outside. Other objects were scattered on the ground just outside. 

The ceiling had been pulled down in the laundry. The many years of dust and animal droppings that fell from the roof space added to the mess and filth.

Three of the lounge curtains had been plucked from the curtain rings and sucked into the next room. When I finally got around to re hanging them two weeks later I discovered half the hooks were missing. And yet I never found a single hook anywhere as I cleaned up. Where did they all go?

Over the next few days every time we walked around we looked for missing things.

200m away I found pieces of the plastic basket that had contained the clothes waiting for me to iron. A couple of the clothes I found. The others were probably caught up in a now dead tree that has since been dragged away.

We picked up pieces of the outside plastic chairs up to three houses away in three different directions. Of three of the chairs we never found a sign at all.

During the five days of no power we either braaied or cooked on gas trying to use up the defrosted things that would spoil soonest.

When my husband went to light the fire the first time he said “oh you know what else is missing, the lid from the braai? And now I realise that is what I saw lying somewhere strange.”

He walked about a 100m and sure enough next to the uprooted stop sign at the start of our little road was the very heavy, flat, metal lid for our tractor wheel braai.

That picture had moved in the opposite direction from most things.

There were a few instances like this where one can see that the air had been swirling. Like in the laundry where a line of cleaning material bottles that had been sitting on a shelf had been swept off ”backwards” and deposited into a laundry basket further along. Like a magic trick! 

That was also where the only actual rain water was found.

It took quite a few days before we got to trying to sort out the laundry as it was so dirty and we didn’t have water for nearly three days. As I moved the remaining items from the shelves I found two little “swimming pools” on the top of ice cream containers I use to store things in.

Other than this the only other evidence of water was in things like the now dirty wavy pages of my bird book. Clearly there had been moisture but it been kept in suspension until the swirling wind got caught up against the possibly cold metal roller door.

Over the next days and weeks as we surveyed the damage in the rest of the Estate that pattern was repeated. One house would stand untouched next to one with most of its roof tiles missing, roof trusses buckled, all the sliding doors and ceilings blown out. 

In one case in the area where the greatest damage occurred there is a huge tree uprooted and next to it an almost untouched house.

Our boat garage had it's roof ripped off,
the heavy duty hasp and padlock never to be seen again,
but the garage next door has no damage at all! 

The houses immediately around us mostly lost a couple of roof tiles and had one or two broken windows. Ours, although not bad compared to others further away, got most of the damage in our little area.

Windows with hand size holes in them are one of the common consequences. They are usually on the back or side of the house as though it is where the wind was trying to escape.

The wind sucked up through this ceiling

After all the damage it had wreaked, nature did us a big favour afterwards.

Most days the wind blew and clouds built up threatening another big storm, whilst roofs stood open and doors had no glass. But each time it moved away without a drop of rain.

On the tenth day, when the emergency repairs were meant to have been finished, and the workmen finally allowed to leave for their Christmas holiday, the heavens opened with a beautiful downpour to feed the damaged trees.

I am hugely grateful for having insurance to cover most of the costs.

If you are in any way involved in designing insurance policies I have an idea for you to make yours stand out from the crowd:

give an ex gratia payment of a few thousand rand when a big mess is left after an incident. It took us two weeks of cleaning to get the inside of the house back to normal. That’s labour (mine and my husband’s in this case), cleaning materials, water and electricity. And we are still finding bits of glass in strange places.

Imagine what it must be like after a flood or a fire. My heart goes out to those who suffer that loss and damage.

Here is a selection of photos my husband took over the couple of days immediately following the storm.

It is expected that it will take most of 2018 to rebuild. 

The power of nature vs man, and sadly, nature vs nature.

Boundary wall flattened

Roofs ripped off the boat garages

Generally thatch roofs coped the best.
However all the thatched umbrellas were ripped up.
Here is one dumped in the swimming pool.

The pattern of the torn out thatch shows the path the wind took

What was left after the boat garages collapsed

Fairly typical damage to the houses in-line with where I was sheltered

The space after trees were moved so I could drive my car out,
whilst trying to see through the shattered windscreen

A 3 seater couch wrapped around a tree!

"weathermasters" took the brunt of it - turning into giant sails

So many huge trees uprooted

Wildlife suffered as well

A very scary experience – part 1

On Monday 11^th December I was driving back from Joburg after delivering a workshop for a Social Entrepreneurship client. This was my last booking for the year and I was looking forward to spending the rest of the week supporting a FinTech client in meeting their big software project delivery deadline and getting up to date on my admin tasks. What do they say about the best laid plans?

As I drove through the village the first drops of rain were quickly followed by hail. I picked up two people who were walking with shopping bags. As we drove out to where they stay the hail stones got bigger and bigger. After dropping them I thought I was close to home but it turned out to be further than I thought. The hail was pelting the car and I saw one hit the road in front of me that was the size of a grapefruit.

Two plots away from our Estate the wind started feeling weird and was hitting me side on. Until then I was just concerned for the damage to my car. Now I was worried for my own safety as well. Along the way I had noticed someone else sheltering in their car under a covered entrance and thought I should have joined them. I concentrated on staying on the road, getting to our Estate, through the gate and under the overhang of the building that’s just inside.

The last few hundred metres seemed an eternity. I was pushing the gate remote long before it could transmit. I stopped right next to the building thinking I would now be protected from the hail. Immediately the tree next to me fell towards the car but was partially held up by the roof. Then one behind and one in front fell. For a few minutes I had time to be grateful that the trees hadn’t crushed the car and I felt protected in a green cocoon of leaves. Then all hell broke loose with objects flying at the windshield and the roof. The windscreen eventually shattered under the bombardment and I could do nothing but huddle in my seat and ask for angelic protection.

I noticed that the door of the building right next to me had a key hanging in the lock. When the tiles stopped flying at me I grabbed my bag and car keys and jumped out the car. The wind was still so strong that it felt as though it would rip the car door off.  As I scrambled at the house door the assistant estate manager opened it, pulled me in and slammed it shut again. He and his wife were praying out loud and I sat in shock trying to breathe until the wind and noise finally abated.

When we went outside we were met by a scene of destruction straight out of the movies. Huge uprooted trees across the roads, roofs with half their tiles off, metal boat garage doors ripped off and flung away, the perimeter wall flattened, gate bent and derailed, and the entrance blocked with trees and debris.  And silence.

Our first views: 

The access gate is beyond the fallen trees

At this stage I hadn't seen that the boats at the end of these garages had been picked up and thrown into the next door property.

 If you zoom into the green square you will see my apple green car buried under and behind the fallen trees.

My first thought was to get hold of my husband to stop him driving back from his meeting and meeting the tornado somewhere along the road. Fortunately, I caught him before he left.

A staff member appeared with a bleeding hand and head complaining that his leg was sore. He had been at the boat garages on the far side of the property. He spoke about how the bricks had flown at him pelting him as he ran away. As he spoke I saw the blood on his face came from a 10 cm gash in his scalp. I didn’t tell him about his head as I thought that would make him go into shock sooner. I got him seated and messaged the village to say that we needed the first aiders.

He was back at work the next day with a bandaged hand and a bandaged head. When I asked if he had a headache he said no the pain tablets worked but he wanted cream for his leg! X-rays had shown it wasn’t broken so it must be very deep bruising which I explained to him would take quite a while to feel good again.

This was all that was left of the building he had been in - just a pile of rubble. He was surprisingly lucky.  

And notice how clear the sky is - just an hour and a half after spewing devastation.    

This is what hit us.

Once the first aiders arrived and the ambulance was on its way I set off to walk to our house to change into more suitable clothes, get a torch and my first aid box, so I could help if we found anyone else who had been injured.

I had to pick my way around fallen trees, roof tiles and sheets of metal. At one point it started raining and I tried to shelter on what used to be a covered and enclosed verandah but the Weathermaster (metal louvered) roof was gone.

As I got closer to the house I thought “oh drat I hope I have my house keys and didn’t leave them in the car”. I need not have worried as the glass from two of the sliding doors was gone. I stepped straight through the frame into another scene out of a movie.

When I saw the damage inside, all the broken glass, a shard of which was embedded in one wall, objects lying two rooms away, cupboard doors pulled open and the back door sucked out, I realised that trapped in my car was probably the safest place I could have been.

Picking up those two people walking with their shopping delayed me by about ten minutes. If I had arrived ten minutes earlier I would either have been caught in the open, taking my facilitation boxes out of the car, or in the house with the debris flying around.

The magical thing is that I never pick people up. I sometimes feel bad, but it just doesn’t feel safe. On that day after I finished the workshop I was hungry. Before going to my next appointment, I turned the car around to drive the few blocks to the local shops. As I did that I saw one of the workshop participants walking towards the corner and guessed he was also going to the shops. I offered him a lift. As we drove we were discussing how sad it is not to be able to pick people up and I thanked him that I could give him a lift.

Because of that earlier experience I didn’t hesitate to pick up the couple walking with their shopping bags as the storm started. Perhaps that saved their lives and my own.

See "A very scary experience - part 2" for a photo essay of the power of nature vs man, and sadly, nature vs nature.