Well I guess we’re all still unsure if it was really a tornado or not.. if it *was* one it certainly didn’t touch ground or do much tornado like damage here.. apparently a lot of the rest of the midwest had some severe tornado damage though.. I hear death count is at 10.

Here we didn’t get a ton of damage.. at least structurally. Most of it happened on the west side of Springfield about right in the middle of the city all the way through the east side apparently. I only got pictures of it from west side to the middle of the city.

Most of the structural damage was pretty minimal.. no roads were torn up or anything.. didn’t look like a tornado had actually touched ground, but there was still significant damage throughout the city for lighter structures.. power/telephone lines, metal buildings, vehicles etc. Lots of cars that were turned over and such though.

Out on the way west side the Asian Food Market was pretty much destroyed. The whole front of it was wrecked.. vehicles were turned over and in the streets. Walmart had some issues too.. mostly just roofing troubles though.. that black stuff they keep on flat commercial roofs was all over the place. There was a lot of roof damage on most of the buildings out there, but the only ones you could really see it on were the hotels that have slant roofs like houses.

Lots of roads were blocked by either cones or by actual stuff in the road. When I was out on the west side it was actually kinda funny.. there were these cones in the road.. bunch of little ones and people were trying to go in between them; two sets of cones.. they made it through the first set, but the second set looked to be too narrow.. so I thought well maybe ill just go move one and try to go through anyway.. it was then that I realized why everyone was turning around: Powerlines. HEH. So yeah.. I stopped right in front of them and made a nice little UTurn like everyone else. It’s really hard to see them when you approach them. Even if you do happen to notice them they just blend in with the sky because you’re so used to seeing powerlines everywhere off in the distance and you don’t pay attention to them. But yeah.. you definitely notice them when you’re right next to them.

I headed out to the center of the city.. tried using wabash to get there.. The mall was blocked off completely.. not so much damage right along wabash, but they had the road blocked off. I could see with my camera that things were pretty bad at the Chatham Rd/Wabash intersection.. I made my way around some barricades, under some powerlines and into the hobby lobby parking lot. From there I got a pretty good view of Wabash.. not too pretty.. there were tons of power/telephone lines down just all over the road. I saw one house somewhat destroyed on the hill on the east side of Chatham Rd.

I went through Jerome and over to MacArthur.. not much bad stuff there.. some things were broken up…signs destroyed, but no real significant structural damage to anything I could see except Penny Lane.

There was some pretty bad damage to one building on Wabash.

Most of the really bad damage happened that I saw happened to buildings that were just thin metal buildings. We got some really big winds and rain too though.. the ducks around here seem to be happy about that though. The ditches are flooded and such. Lots of tree branches all over the place.. a few trees uprooted.

Power went out last night pretty early apparenly.. came back on this morning at my house around 0700. No damage to report here. Tornado sirens were going on and off last night a bunch.. lots of heavy wind and rain that sounded like hail, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t hail.