I experienced my first tornado last week and it was a horrifying experience. I hid in the closet on the lowest floor so that I wouldn’t get swept away. Compared to all of the movies where I’ve seen tornadoes doing damage, this seemed much worse, and I didn’t even get a good look at the tornado. A lot of debris was thrown around, and the power was knocked out for days. Surprisingly, my house was still standing, but there was some damage done to it. I needed new window shutters because a tree had crashed through one of my windows and damaged the shutters with it.
Given how much damage was done, a simple shutter replacement was nothing when compared to everything else. All I really had to do was choose the shutters online and have someone install them for me. I’m not looking forward to the roof repairs that have to be done, nor the window replacement. I suppose things could have been worse, as in the entire house collapsing and crushing me in the process. I’m thankful that my house wasn’t damaged beyond what it got, and that I at least had insurance to take care a lot of the costs.
Getting the house back to the way it was before the tornado came will take some time, and in that time, I hope that there aren’t any more tornadoes. I’m not really prepared to handle another storm just yet, and I’m sure that the people who have homes with worse damage than mine aren’t ready either. The last thing we all need is to have to scramble to the store to stock up on supplies again and board as much of our homes as possible while hoping that the existing damage doesn’t get worse or leave a vulnerability.