Accuweather called it a "Super Storm".  The Seattle Times called it "The Big Blow".  KOMO TV called it "The Great Wind Storm of 2006"... NFL TV called it a "Monsoon"... whatever name it went by, last night's storm was pretty impressive.  Hurricane force winds, stretching from Canada to California... Far larger than any storm that ever hit Florida... it it had formed in the tropics, it'd take up the entire Gulf of Mexico.

It started off dumping more than an inch of rain in an hour, then the rain continued, but the winds kicked in.  I don't know how fast it was blowing where I lived, but it sure made a racket out there during the night.

At around 4 or so, we heard a chain saw... I checked out the noise, and noticed the fire department clearing a tree out of the road...

I looked out another window, and noticed another tree down, resting on a neighbor's car.

The firemen were spotlighting it, so I used their lights to help me take a photo...

Seeing the tree knocked down, I decided to go check on Gar, my Mariner, and the Shadow Lady's car...

The power is out everywhere I could see... it seemed that Bellevue, across the lake, had power, and the sky seemed to glow in the direction of Seattle, so it seemed that this particular outage was limited to the Island.

The road was littered with debris, but our cars are fine.  Slim had some twigs on it, but they were quite small, and I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.

I walked down to where the tree was to check things out.

Ouch.

The rootball ripped out of the ground, which I'm sure was softened by the 2 inches of rain we got yesterday.  More than an inch fell in the Seattle Area between 4 and 5pm, and then the winds kicked in...

The owners of this car were in for a bad start to their day, unfortunately.

The roof was caved in, and the hood was crushed along with the windshield.  It looked to be a fairly new car, too.

The tree stretched across the road, so that lane was blocked.  Its a loop, though, which is why the firemen left it there - folks could simply drive around the other way... they were probably making sure things were passable in the event of an emergency, rather than cleaning everything up.

I walked over to where the other tree had fallen over the roadway... and saw where they had been cutting.

No cars were in the path of this tree... it fell harmlessly over the roadway.  The firemen had done a good job with opening the road.

They said on NWCN's website that it could be days before some areas have their power restored... the Shadow Lady and I might be heading to a hotel... exciting times!  :-)

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