The good news is that your humble freelance hack blogger has the household power and Internet restored. That was nuts! The derecho storm marched right through the middle of Iowa, and I have to say in retrospect I’d rather have ten tornadoes than another derecho.
Just add an Iowa Hurricane to the list of 2020 events. @NWSDesMoines@KCRG_FirstAlert @KWWLStormTrack7 pic.twitter.com/iwKUAaTeKh
— Chad Spore (@cjspore) August 10, 2020
So I’m obligated to blog the experience both for a first-person historical account and to explain to my freelance clients why I vanished for two days. Pictures here are from the news, not mine.
What it’s like after a derecho and city-wide blackout
In the first place, most of the destruction occurred in the late morning hours of Monday, August 10th 2020. It just hit with a force like a shock wave. Trees flying immediately.
The power blinked off within minutes, and we could guess why. What we didn’t know is that this time, the storm’s effects were widespread. Our Internet router was of course knocked out too, but our land line phone remained functional. We hopped onto mobile, but discovered that our local mobile coverage was also spotty.
Meanwhile, the entire city was in chaos!
Why I can’t just blog from a Starbucks when this happens
Clients seem to be under-impressed when I report that a Midwest storm has delayed our work schedule, so let me try to convey why it’s not that simple to recover.
Once the storm had subsided by about noon, our first thought was surveying the damage. Trees were blocking streets with power lines broken and flailing on the ground everywhere. Our immediate neighbor had an entire tree obstructing his front door trapping him in there, and he’s an elderly guy living alone. His grandkids showed up and several neighbors wandered outside, and together we dragged the debris clear from his porch.
Next everybody pitched in to clear the streets. We have branches piled up to the side of the street now awaiting collection.
Of course, power was out everywhere. You keep a storm kit handy when you live in Iowa, and ours was stocked. We have storm candles, flashlights with plenty of batteries, a hand-crank camper’s flashlight, a battery-operated AM-FM radio, and a land-line phone. We tried calling in the outage but Midamerican’s phone lines were jammed, likely with calls just like ours.
We have mobile phones, tablets, and laptops, but of course those are only good until the battery charge runs out. Mobile data was still out; either there was cell tower damage or else communication channels were just too busy to let more than a trickle of data through to us. By late afternoon, I ventured out in search of that fabled “Starbucks.”
The city was a mess! Traffic lights were out at every intersection, so we were all on the stop-and-go standard. This meant every intersection was gridlocked by people who don’t know how stop-and-go traffic works. Block after block, the power outage extended to businesses which were now out of business. Keep in mind we had this on top of the COVID-19 pandemic too, so a lot of services we’d normally have were suspended as well.
When I did finally find a place with power, that’s where everybody else had headed too. That was Burger King. The drive-through line was out to the street, but my concern was wifi. “WhopperWifi,” as it turned out, was flaky and unreliable in the jammed parking lot with people coming for miles around to use a poor, overworked router that normally saw a few dozen users per day.
So that’s a lesson in what’s really going to go down in an apocalypse. Your only hope will be pinned on Burger King, good luck.
This was near a hospital, and in fact major areas that still had power were places like hospitals which need emergency generators, or malls which used their own power source. It turns out both were inaccessible by traffic gridlock. In addition, through all this, emergency vehicles struggled to plow through the traffic.
I gave up on the metro and headed for the hills. Getting out of town and into farmland, the going was smoother because there’s fewer trees and hence fewer blackouts. Eventually a made it to one of our fabled Iowa Casey’s, where at last I found a wifi signal that wasn’t too crowded. I hopped on my laptop and let clients know what was happening and why I might be scarce for a few days.
Just because this Casey’s was out by the highway didn’t mean it wasn’t busy. I ventured in with the hopes of bringing home a hot meal for the household to dine by candlelight, but they’d been cleaned out already. We weren’t that bad off at home and there were moms with little kids there trying to build dinner out of Lunchables and gas station sandwiches. I wasn’t about to compete with them.
In the middle of Casey’s, several of us dads pooled our knowledge. Where’s power, what’s open, what routes are clear? We traded stories of what was going on to the north, south, east, and west, but every story was the same. Endless blackout, traffic gridlock, destruction everywhere. This was so surreal, because we all had our anti-COVID masks on. It was just like a scene out of The Mist or Maximum Overdrive. Stephen King is a Yankee, after all, so maybe he draws inspiration from these kinds of events whenever he has a band of survivors holed up in a store, which happens a lot in his novels, if you notice.
Driving home is of course a maze of avoiding damage. I drove around a tree blocking the street at one point only to be greeted by a snapping power line right next to my window. Drove under a power pole leaning at a 45° angle with a few orange cones around it. Side streets were out of the question and accidents piling up at major intersections weren’t helping matters.
So yeah. It’s not simply a matter of “go blog at a Starbucks.” Not this time. Even if you find one with power, there’s a bit more pressing issues going on. I can’t just shove my way through saying “I’m a blogger, I must update right now!”
Slow recovery from derecho damage
After a night of simple analog amusements by candlelight after a humble lunchmeat sandwich dinner, we piled into the car the next day to continue our pursuit of civilization. There were reports of hotels which had power, but they were all naturally booked as well.
Even though power was slowly being restored, much of the city was still in the same condition. We got out to drag debris off the road or right a traffic cone here and there. Again, whenever we’d find an outpost that had the lights on, there were more crowds.
In the middle of this, we realized we’d need ice bags for our fridge. We visited three stores that were out of ice, and one taking cash only because their card-reader POS system went kerblewie. By now I was beginning to crack. First the pandemic hit and we had to travel miles to find a freaking roll of toilet paper, and now we were a caravan traveling the breadth of the land in a fruitless quest for a bag of ice. I gibbered at the steering wheel while simultaneously avoiding too much traffic and impassable streets.
Once again an outpost Casey’s out of town saved the day. We returned home with an extra shot of batteries and candles (stores were running out of these too) and holed up at home with the windows open against the muggy August Midwest weather.
The power finally came on in the late evening. Utility crews had been working around the clock, and now as of this writing on 8/12, thousands are still without power. We’re one of the lucky neighborhoods. As it stands, the best way to help out is to stay home and out of traffic so crews can get through to finish restoring the city.
This is still happening across the Midwest. Chicago got hit with some seven tornado touchdowns alone.
If nothing else, I think we’ve all learned some lessons about true large scale disasters happening in unexpected places, and the need for emergency measures to be in place to prevent the disorganized chaos we saw this time.
Derechos are a thing?
There is indeed a Wikipedia page on derechos. The edit history shows the entry was created in 2004, so if this is your first time hearing about one, we all missed the memo. They’re basically the equivalent of an inland hurricane. The wind speeds from this one got up to 100 MPH. That left debris flying fast enough to penetrate houses and windshields, or do funky tricks like this:
Maybe a tornado can blow Dorothy and Toto to Oz, but a derecho will make you feel like you live there!
