April 2nd - Indy Tornado

Last night I drove back home to Indy from South Bend. It was raining a little bit, but I didn't pay much attention to it, got home, and watched some TV for a while when I got home. I noticed that there was a tornado warning for Marion County, so I decided to watch some of the weather broadcast. Channel 12 was having their normal "freak out" session like they do whenever it rains hard, but there were some tornadoes, so it was understandable. As I watched, I heard the weatherman say that a tornado had been reported to have touched down near the corner of Mann and Mills Roads. That's our house (the little house icon on the south side of Indy) and the location of the aforementioned intersection (the yellow cross). That's only 4 miles from our house.

Well, after I heard that, I figured maybe this tornado thing was serious. Turns out that it was. Suddenly the cable went out and the wind turned up. I looked outside the back door by opening it and it was thundering loud wind and just a wall of water going by so fast that it was completely sideways. I heard a cracking sound that sounded like wood breaking, making me wonder how the house was going to hold up. After that, the power went out and it was pitch black. I crawled to the MagLite (thanks Dave) that was in the cupboard and got it and ran to the dining room and shoved the table over to the corner and got under it. The thundering loud wind continued for about a minute, then it died back down to a normal thunderstorm.

After the wind died down I called Jill to tell her what happened, and the power came back on. It actually stopped raining and completely cleared up about 30 minutes later, so I looked outside to see what had happened. Our fence was perpendicular to the wind direction, so it took a pretty hard force and the post nearest the house bent over until it was touching the fireplace vent. I tried to push it back, but it's stuck that way like the concrete shifted in the ground along with the post.
This is hard to see, but it's our neighbor's grill that had somehow "blown" from his backyard, down his yard, and across the street. If it had kept going up our yard it would've been in our living room, so I'm pretty happy that it stopped. I was pretty surprised to see that it made it that far (about 75-100 feet).
This is the wooded area next to our house - it's a little hard to see, but check out the big tree that's fallen over in the background. There's also a bunch of debris on the sidewalks everywhere.
This is the tree behind our back neighbor's house. I think this was the cracking sound when it was falling over and the branches were crashing through the smaller trees. What makes me think a small tornado went over our house was this tree damage, because this was the scene behind the house, but out front, behind those houses, no trees are knocked over.
Chase was glad that our trees in front made it through the storm :)