I had arrived home at 7:15p.m. on 3/12/06 after returning from a trip to the Transworld Haunt Show at Rosemont, IL over the weekend. I had been on the road and was unaware of the impending weather situation. Around 7:30pm I was flipping through stations and had seen warnings to the west, but didn't think much of it. I continued to watch our local FOX affliate which does not carry weather watches. I believe it was around 8pm when the storms began, and I spotted a Tornado warning on another station, for Sangamon County shortly thereafter. Myself and my friend went to my basement immediately, and I tuned the basement the local ABC affiliate which interrupts programming to give live updates. Around 8:15pm sirens began sounding. My house is in the middle of two different coverage areas, so I was able to hear two different sirens in different directions from my house. The power began to flicker when I heard the Siren to the Southwest go silent. This caused us to take shelter behind my bar which is 3ft from the basement wall. Within minutes the power had gone out, and the roar of the wind was on us. We could hear some windows break, but most disturbing was hearing constant "gunshots". I had originally thought they were Transformers popping, but the sound wasn't sporadic enought to be that. It was in regular intervals, and very loud. After the wind died down, we waited until almost 9 to emerge. When we came out of the house to inspect damage, we could hear a loud train like sound coming from the East side of town.
That sound was the steam being released from the boilers at the Power Plant on the Southeast side of town. Due to the massive outage, the safeties on the boilers popped allowing fo rthe release of steam in order to insure the safety of those at the plant, and to prevent damage to the equipment. I live more than 3 miles from the plant, yet it was very loud. At that point in time we had 65,000 customers without power. Each customer represents 1 house or business. Springfield only has a population of 115,000, so you can kind of figure how many were without power. By morning the number was reduced to 45,000, then to 12,000 by 24 hours after the storm. I am very proud of the job my company did to restore power. Both Engineering and Lineman worked hellacious hours, and had all residential power restored wthin a week. This was despite the loss of several hundred poles, major transmission lines, and two substations. Below are some of the 400+ pictures I have taken. I will be editing this topic with new imageshack links, as I can get to resizing them.
Inside of a damaged factory
Line outside of same factory a few days after the Tornadoes
Car in lot next to that line (Note - This car was picked up and smashed on end on a light pole base, then rolled back to upright. It was owned by an insurance company for less than three days)
Transmission line near Lindbergh & Veterans Parkway
Transmission & Distribution running along Bike Trail (Former Railroad) Feeding several Neighboorhoods
Pedestrian bridge on same trail with transmission lines across it
Local bar with roof caved in
East side nieghboorhood - Notice the Flag still flying
Garage hit by pole that was snapped by a flying roof
Remains of an Ice factory Near Macarthur & Wabash
Damaged home
Lauterbach Man! - an icon of our West Side. Thousands of cars pass it in a day. With and without its head.
The official Pizza place of Six Flags is
A little East side humor
Senger Ave near Cook - Transmission poles
Wabash Ave. East of the Lauterbach Man
Strip mall North of that line
Local radio group tower
Thats it for now - I'll post more when I can get some of 'em resized.
