UPDATES:

OK, just got off the phone with my wife. More reports.

- Power is still out. Generator and fuels doing fine.

- Phone and cell service nominal. (as an aside - we have both corded "old fashioned" phones and cordless phones in the house. I keep 2 extra "old style" phones in our communications box.

- Damage is localized and linear - looks like it came straight through my area, didn't seem to do nearly as much damage just 2 miles north or south.

- One of my neighbor's houses took a large tree square on. The house is severely damaged/destroyed. Don't have a firm report yet.

- Another neighbor's STONE barn blew down. Yes, a stone barn. They are taking it in stride, my kids are over in their pool right now!

- Tree clearing on the south end of my road is moving well, but still no sense of if the road will re-open today. (hope to get a LOT of free wood chips!)

- Lots and lots of damage of many kinds from falling/flying debris to other homes. Apparently, we were very, very lucky.

- A few more trees down on my property, far away from the house. One of my trees into my neighbor's power lines, just leaning, didn't take them down.

- Still plenty of damage to the power grid, no clear eta on restoration.


ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

- The speed that this hit with was incredible. If I was out in my back yard at the furthest corner, I don't know if I could have made it back to the house in the time it took for this to go from a "a bit rainy" to "get into the basement NOW". Given the size of the branches that are down I don't like this thought at all.

- The loss of data services while voice continued was VERY frustrating.

- My kids were great. No panic, a little whimpering from my five-year-old, but they did EXACTLY what they were told INSTANTLY.

- In the past NOAA has issued SO MANY alerts and "Warnings" that, although I had heard the familiar BZRRAPPP-BZRAPP-BZRAPP of the NOAA warnings on the radio not long before this event, I tuned it out. They are the agency that constantly cries wolf with useless stuff like: "Warning: It's going to be hot in July" - over and over and I think that they do a disservice abusing their alerting system the way they do. I don't even HAVE a weather alert radio anymore because I got sick of all the BS watch and warning alerts for ordinary weather.

It's good to hear that your preparations paid of and that you and your family are well.

Martin,

I urge you to get a new weather radio. The one that I rely on allows the user to disable the warnings that aren't desired. This feature was added to address the problem that you stated... too many needless warnings. I have mine set to alert only for high wind and tornados since everything else in my area is usually predicted with enough advance warning to get prepared.

Here's the Amazon link to the model that I have: http://www.amazon.com/Midland-WR-300-MID...3432&sr=8-1

Bah-da-duh...bwah-dah-dah-dudu-duh...

Sorry. A-Team theme song ran through my head.

Does this make you Hannibal?

Martin, that was a little close. Glad to hear it missed you, and that your plan executed without a serious hitch.

So, did it sound like a freight train?

Excellent job by the whole family!

I keep going back and forth between getting a portable generator and a Kohler that runs on the natural gas line. If the gas line is disrupted, then you're sol. But you don't have to store fuel.

Do you have diesel or gas?

Glad you and your family are ok Martin. Take care.

Looks interesting...does it allow me to TOTALLY DISABLE anything that is not a WARNING for Tornado or Radiological event? I know it snows in winter. I know thunderstorms are dangerous. I know it gets hot in the summer.

I don't need alerts on these. I want ONLY alerts for ACTIVE and actually DANGEROUS events.

Gasoline. Which is a major PITA - if I had it to do again, I'd go with a diesel and power it off my fuel oil tank. I always have about 300 gallons of fuel on-site in the basement, it won't gel and I don't have to worry about maintaining it.

My experience indicates that any type of alert can be totally disabled. In your case, you would probably want to enable only warnings for the events that you wish to monitor. Warnings are issued for confirmed active events or those which have been indicated by radar. Watches and advisories are more about what "could" happen because conditions are ripe.

Like I said, I have enabled only high wind and tornado warnings. The radio also uses SAME technology, which means that one can set it to monitor specific geographic areas (usually broken down by county). I set mine to monitor my home county and the neighboring counties to the west since our severe weather generally comes from the west. This allows a bit more advance notice that something bad might be headed our way.

One other nice feature is that the radio can be configured to sound a siren type alert and then turn on the radio speaker so that the actual NWS broadcast can be heard. In this mode, the broadcast is heard for five minutes and then the radio goes back to silent/monitor mode. There are indicator lights on the radio that stay lit while warnings/watches are active, allowing one to know that they missed an alert if they were away when it was issued.

On a final note, the radio will even alert on AMBER alerts and stuff like that, all of which can be disabled.

I sound like a salesman but I am not. I am just convinced that this is the best type of weather radio available. I bought one for each household in my family. If you have questions, we can take this to email if you like.