The Rockford Illinois Storm of July 5

The Rockford Illinois Storm of July 5, 2003...

It was about 4:15am on Saturday, July 5, 2003. I was in my room which is in the basement talking on AIM with a friend who also lives in Rockford. I told him that McDonalds starts serving breakfast at 4:30am, and that I was going to go get some. I put shoes on and went upstairs and noticed it was raining. I opened the door and looked; I thought I could handle it, and sprinted to my car. I sat in the car, soaking wet, and started it. I drove one block through my neighborhood and decided I could not see enough even with my wipers on to go any further. I turned around, went in the house, and turned on the weather channel to see what was up...There was a ticker on the bottom that read: "...MAY DOWN TREES AND POWERLINES...". Suddenly, the screen turned to snow, and I never was able to tell what happened. 30 seconds later, the power went off. Then it came on, it browned out off and on for another 20 seconds, then went off. I went down to my room, and it started going on and off again, so I unplugged my computer. I went back upstairs, and woke my mom up so she knew what was going on. We sat on the couch and watched it for awhile...red lightning, blue lightning, green lightning... Finally the storm calmed. She said to me "It would be pretty bad if that tree in the back yard would have fallen, because it would hit the pool." It must not have fallen because we didn't hear it. I went downstairs to get my flashlight from my room. I came back up and my mom was looking out the window of the back door. She said "It DID fall down!" I looked outside, and sure enough, all I could see was a massive bass wood tree occupying nearly all of the back yard. I went out with my light to inspect. It in fact did not damage the pool. Only the very top branches of the tree hit it, and were small enough they just bent. I went in the front yard to look at stuff. And the neighbor was getting lights from his work truck, and I asked him how they were doing, he pointed at his house and said: "A tree fell on the house!" I looked, and there was a huge maple tree on their house. I wished him luck and went back in. My brother was up by now wondering what all the commotion was about. My mom, my brother and I decided we'd go drive around and check out the damage at other places. We drove out of the neighborhood, noticing many large branches in the road, and came out to the main road. Down the road, we noticed that there were no traffic lights working, and not a single building had power. My mom's car was almost out of gas, so we came back in the other side of the neighborhood. After taking a few turns through the mess of garbage strewn about, there was a truck from the electric company in front of us, he drove right in our way, blocking us. He proceeded to tell us that there were power lines down everywhere, and to find another way home. So we went back around and made it home. My brother and I went back out in my car, with the digital camera and took pictures of the havoc. The west side of town had it worse than us by far. Nearly all the traffic lights were not working, and there were power lines down everywhere. When we came back home there was still no power. I went to sleep, and got up at 4pm to go to work at UPS. We still had no power, and still, most of the traffic lights were not working. After 8pm, I came back from work, and still no power. My mom was out looking for ice to put in the fridge. Every store in town that was open was sold out of ice.

At 8am Sunday, I went to the ice house, and waited in line for 10 minutes to pay for my 20lbs of ice, and 10lbs dry ice, then waited another hour to actually get the ice. when I got to the front of the line, I got my 20lbs of ice, and they told me the saw for the dry ice broke and to come back later. By the time we got out of there, cars were lines up to the road. My mom went back out to get the dry ice at about 12pm. At 1pm, the power came back on! by 1:20pm, it was off again. it stayed off until 5 or 6pm, and stayed on. I went to bed at 6am Monday, July 7th, and at 8am, a storm was rolling through again, and the power went on and off about 5 times, and finally stayed on.

Well here are the pictures:

The two pictures below show the tree that fell in my backyard.