Tornado aftermath, or how my weekend was

#1

I hope everyone has a great weekend. I was looking forward to CMP but the tornados nIxed that. Power may be restored to the city center of Huntsville some time Monday. Cell service has been out where I live until this morning.

While surrounding areas got a lot of damage, the city had very little. The big problem has been the lack of power. Hopefully that will come back soon and before other results of the outage become severe. There is little chance of finding gas and if the outage lasts too long water service could fail.

Yesterday my son and I went war-driving for cell service and found a spot where we could catch up on email and phone calls. Food isn’t a problem, though for many cooking it is. I suspect that there is no charcoal or Butane to be had. I have a gas range top, so cooking (if a bit limited) isn’t a problem. Though having to cook by the light of a Coleman lantern makes it more interesting.

#2

Glad to hear you and you’re family are OK. That was a hell of a mess and many people are not so lucky.

Don

#3

We get the wrath of hurricanes down here around every 5 years. The power outage and lack of gasoline are definitely the two biggest problems in the aftermath. Normally I evacuate if a hurricane is coming anywhere close and don’t return till the answering machine picks up when I call my house meaning phone lines and power have been restored. Obviously with tornados you don’t have the luxury of knowing many days in advance. Hopefully power trucks from all the surrounding areas are coming to help as they often do following hurricanes.

#4

Glad you made it out ok. I’ve had a few friends from Huntsville come up to Nashville for the last 4 days just so they could get gas, power, etc. Crazy how hard all of Alabama got hit!

#5

I understand that utilitiy workers came from as far away as New Jersery. One report has some 4000 folks working on the downed transmission lines. They’ve done an awesome job in getting power back up. Pretty much everthing from Decatur to just north of Birmingham was affected buy the damage to the tranmission lines.

A good bit of Huntsville proper and surrounding areas have power this morning. Research park, on the west side of Huntsville is still w/o power, but as TVA can bring in more power that will come up (maybe this evening). There’s no point in my going in to work until that happens.

There’s an odd twist to this event. Tuesday night the big UPS that runs our data center blew out and folks worked until 3am. to get everythin back up. Parts had to be be flown in so the UPS was in bypass mode on stright line power. For some reason (which I’m not sure I believe) our maintenance guys asserted that we couldn’t force the generator to run as long as there was city power. So the power drops during the storm Wednesday wreaked havoc. Once the power was out for good and we were on stable generator power the data center was finally brought all the way back up. Eaton fixed the UPS Friday and we’ve been running off generator. Life would have been a lot less stressful if we could have forced the switch to generator Tuesday night. It isn’t my call, but I’d make damm sure that we could force then generator to run regardless of whether line power is present. Something like this could happen again.

#6

Either they are wrong or the system was designed by an idiot. The switch box serving the UPS should happily change power input from line to generator. This is a common requirement because sometimes line power interruptions are a planned event.

#7

I know that there isn’t a manual override and that it does do failover. I think that the sense lead is on the load side of the main breaker that feeds all of the loads the generator can pick up. It would make no sense to wire it any other way. Ordinarily it wouldn’t not be a problem as the UPS would pick up the load, but in this case we had no UPS.

#8

Jim,

Glad to hear you’re ok. All my co-workers down there have been accounted for. A few of our team members (@ Toyota) have lost their homes and the plant is still shut down until at least Wednesday. However, some engines were being shipped out today to our TX and IN truck plants. I wish the Huntsville area a speedy recovery. The extent of the damage is just unimaginable…
I did see that Eric VanCleef made his way up to the Tire Rack and started in the One Lap, but I believe they blew a head gasket in the first event (#16 Subaru STi).

#9

It is good to hear that other folks in this area are okay. We don’t expect to have power at work until this evening, at which time I’ll have work to do. When you see the damage that occured right around Huntsville you realize that it is really just a roll of the dice. If you get lucky you escape the devastation, and if not…

#10

Good to hear that you guys are OK Jim. We’re up near Hwy53/Research Park Blvd. and just got electricity back on at 4am today. We did have some trees down and lost one section of fence, but nothing major. It’s an inconvenience, but hard to complain about after seeing some of the other houses in our area. I did spend more time in the last 6 days driving a chainsaw and wood chipper than I have in the last several years combined.

Matt

#11

I’m glad to hear that you are okay and that you have power now.

Matt, are you going to come to TGPR this month for the second MidSouth event? You should and I promise you’ll have fun.

#12

Jim,
Glad to hear you’re okay! (I grew up in Tornado Alley so I know the feeling…)
–Fred

#13

I live in Birmingham and we were missed by the tornado by about just over a mile. We had a little damage at our Bessemer house and some roof and gutter damage at our Hoover house. Nothing major and nothing I can’t take care of myself. We are extremely lucky compared to the 200+ that lost thier lives(many of which my wife and I know) and the countless number of people that were displaced by this series of storms. My thought and prayers go out to all. ALLEN

#14

We got real lucky. An F5 that went diagonally North Alamaba passed very close to Huntsville. You can get a good idea of how bad it was from the preliminary track map at:

http://www.cbs42.com/mostpopular/story/Tornado-tracks-across-Alabama/OqwaFn4ozUe7b69OmdmB2A.cspx

Had that monster’s path been a few miles south it would have gone through Decatur and Hunsville would have made the devastation in Tuscaloosa look like a minor urban renewal project (Tuscaloosa had an F4).

It is a liitle hard to piece together good data as in many cases reporters don’t fully understand what they are told. But I gather that TVA had over 300 transmission towers down from the swarm in NA. They apparently had to pretty much build a line from the Widows Creek power plant to get any power to Huntsville.

#15

[quote=“jlevie” post=56819]
Matt, are you going to come to TGPR this month for the second MidSouth event? You should and I promise you’ll have fun.[/quote]

I’d like to, but we’ve got some travel this month and it’s just not going to work out. I’m hoping to make the July event in Memphis.

Matt