The storm:
From 1978 to 1983, I was living with my Mom in Findlay, Ohio, about an hour’s drive south of Toledo and not far from the law school that I attended during that time. She lived there until she died in 2003, and I’ve been there many, many times. Still have friends there. (Waves at a Kat!)
The recent stories about flooding in Ohio caught my eye, and when one of them mentioned that Interstate 75 was closed by water, that grabbed me - where in the world would I-75 be in that sort of flat, poorly drained - oh, crap, must be - yep, Findlay. Here’s a slideshow of photos from all of that. I would imagine that the folks who bought my Mom’s house are now dealing with a flooded basement…
Right now, I’m down in my office in the basement, overseeing the sump pump, which wasn’t working earlier, and water was starting to seep up into the office area. More on that below.
After looking at the pictures of Findlay mentioned above, I thought to call an old librarian friend I met in Findlay in 1978 to tell him about the flooding. He might not have heard…
Steve Stangle was a very sweet guy, but he was horribly repressed and a terrible chamaeleon as to what he was into in a big way. When I first met him, he was the compleat stereotypical Jewish neurotic nebbish, and terribly frustrated with his life in all possible ways. He turned me on to a lot of odd underground comix, to the big progressive rock bands, and had a sly, wicked sense of humor, and was endlessly chatty.
And not very stable. He converted to Catholicism, married an ex-nun, and ended up going off to Florida for a “reference barbarian” job at the St. Augustine Public Library. As time went on, he stayed in touch better with my mom than me, and part of that was due to wilder and wilder bipolar swings on his part; it took less to set him off, or else you’d be treated to an hour long treatise on how his cat wasn’t eating right divined on the noises it was making. His wife (who I was also friendly with) had divorced him due to all this stuff, and has since remarried and moved away.
When Mom died, he had sent a note to Mom that got rerouted here - he hadn’t known she was ill, and I ended up calling him and telling him of her long and painful progress to the grave, and to say he was stunned by the news is to put it mildly. He never wrote or called after that, and he fell off my radar until I saw the flood pictures and recognized a house he’d lived in in Findlay.
So I dug around, and found that about a year after I spoke to him, Steve had died, alone, in St. Augustine. *sigh* Nope, can’t call him. Poor Steve.
I did call my old pal Cindy, who moved there again after a horrible time in New Orleans trying to pick up the pieces in the aftermath of Katrina. She and I were discussing the situation in Findlay when my MIL came down the stairs in a great hurry and said - we have to go - now - to get Meredith from school. The sirens are sounding…
Meredith’s new school is roughly three blocks from our house. We got into the SUV, MIL driving, and the sky was - well, ugly and black, the sirens were howling doomsday, and the wind was coming up FAST. I don’t remember the sirens coming up before unless there was a significant risk of tornados, and I ran into the school to get Mere and bring her home.
Inside, I quickly found that the kids had all been pulled from their classes and put into a safe-ish windowless hallway; Mere was in a duck-and-cover position, head down and towards the lockers on the side of the hall, along with the other kids. The staff told me I could come in and take shelter, but nobody was going out into the storm.
So I sat, not far away from Mere (who knew I was there), and waited out the fury of the storm with her, while my MIL was outside in the SUV, battened down and waiting for us. At one point, my still-very-hurting ear registered a serious pressure-pain response, the sort you’d get from an abrupt change in pressure. My concern was that something out there was cutting loose…
Eventually, Mere and I could get out of there - the kids were starting to shred, and the bus drivers were being informed of trees and power line down in the area to avoid. Mere was tired, but hyper from the excitement; when we got home, the power was out, and we started to be able to get through again our cell phones to an anxious Susan, at the office downtown.
Susan had found out about tornado warnings in the city and tried to take shelter, but found that the federal buildings staff weren’t being helpful on the subject. They didn’t watch the weather, had no plan for any protection (the building in question is walled top to bottom international-style in glass) and no alerts were being passed on - Susan had seen them on the internet, but they said - hey, Chicago can’t have tornados, so who’s worried?
(This is, of course, total BS - Chicago had a tornado last year!)
She was honked off, needless to say, and headed for the train station to come home.
The train made decent time, considering the many reports of downed trees, power lines, and other debris on the roads and the tracks we were hearing on the radio. (WGN, Susan’s usual news station, was nonstop broadcasting a baseball game, and we had to go to another station on the battery-operated radio in the house.) At length, we picked Susan up, went out to eat and had another BIG storm blast away around us inside there, and stopped and bought a couple of heavy-duty electric lanterns at a sporting goods store.
(Mere has a fascination with flashlights, and tends to take the prepositioned ones off somewhere to play with the things - if you can find them again, they usually have no charge in the batteries…)
Home again to two anxious dogs who might well have cried MOMMY!!!!! for the way that they huddled against Susan when she came in. I went to my office with a flashlight, yanked the computers off the floor as I noticed the seepage on the basement floor, and fretted over the possibility of yet another flood. More stuff went off the floor, and I hoped like hell that the power would come back and the sump would be runnable.
The power came back around 8:30 pm, and Susan stayed up to watch the local news for more stuff on the storm and downtown. Apparently the actual tornado didn’t appear, but there was damage everywhere from 70-80 MPH winds throughout the city. More waves of BIG thunderstorms ran through again and again, and Meredith and Susan went off to bed around 9:30, after Mere’s manic-ness from her fears of the storms, the adult reactions around her all day about them and the scary blackness of the power loss period turned into dead-flat exhaustion. The dogs trotted after, and I went to bed for a while, knowing that my ear would wake me up in a couple of hours to deal with the sump.
That was probably taking a chance, but it worked out- I got the sump working, and it’s doing fine now. The incessant rain has also died down somewhat. And now, back off to bed.