If you’ve watched the news, you’ve probably seen how hard Oklahoma and surrounding areas like Louisiana and Texas got hit by severe storms a week ago. I don’t watch much news, but I’m sure it’s national news.

My hometown seems to have been hit pretty hard, especially the middle of it where I reside. There were snapped trees and power lines, completely uprooted trees and damaged roofs on every street, not to mention that the lines were down in some places with widespread power outages, tens of thousands – like 200k people without power.

High winds like we’ve never seen here blew through and caused insane damage. No tornadoes reported, but the winds were that close to a tornado anyway.

The crazy thing is… our power blew before the real storm got to us. The winds picked up, we were talking about how crazy that was and that was a little after midnight I think? We were quickly grabbing flashlights while we were simultaneously hearing the tornado sirens blare for a very long time. The radio finally came on since the cable was out and we couldn’t get cell service either to get storm updates. It was an uncertain time as I sat on the closet floor holding onto the doorknob just in case I needed to pull it shut all the way.

Nothing happened after, for us anyway. We were out of power. We expected it to get hot. We didn’t know what to expect as far as damage around us goes.

After finally going to sleep, I awoke to no power, a downed tree blocking our dead end street and some tree limbs down in our backyard. This was far from the amount of damage many of our residents had around town, even in our neighborhood.

My Grandma and I packed a few things expecting power to be restored in a day or so. Again, at this point with no cell service and no news to watch because no power, we were ignorant of the destruction around us. We went to my mom’s house less than a mile away where she was one of only a few in our part of town who retained power throughout the storm. To get there, we went up into the grass and off the curb in my grandma’s car (because her vehicle can handle that type of ride better than my mustang that was in the garage). We also had to dodge street debris, down power lines and uprooted trees. It was a mess. A sight to see.

Our short stay turned into 5 full days and nights at my mom’s house.

Because I normally work from home and was out of power, but my office building downtown has power on Monday, I was able to go into the office to work the whole week. I haven’t been in office that many days in a row since pre-COVID times! I wasn’t the only one in the office from my department so I didn’t feel so alone until Friday came. With people being off work, working from home once their power was restored, or they had arrangements, by Friday I was the only one at the office until about 8am when my my manager was able to get to the office.

Throughout the week we were given different estimates of power restoration, but Friday morning before work I went by the house to check the power. Our neighbors got power overnight, but unfortunately the four of us that are connected to the transformer in our backyard were still without. I called PSO once I arrived at the office to confirm the outage and that it was reported. A couple of hours later it was restored and then the cooling process started.

We were extremely grateful for the power to come back. Thursday night I had gone in the house to grab some earbuds I had needed all week (and then Friday I didn’t even need them) and the temperature gauge goes up to 90° and that’s where it was. 👀 It was noticeably HOT. Once the power came back though, it started to cool down. It took 12 hours for it to fully get back to normal inside – with the AC on and the fans all going.

You don’t realize how much you take for granted when you’re used to the luxury of AC 24/7 and then suddenly you’re in the heat in your own house in 90° Oklahoma summer days. I couldn’t help but remember how different heat felt in Arizona and miss that experience all over again.

Things I’ve grateful for during this time…

• A “cool” place to stay (mom’s house) during the week
• Flexibility – my work week was different, but all around, things were flexible
• No structural damage – I know there are so many others who suffered this, but I’m grateful that we were spared
• Provision regarding food and gas – gas in particular got scarce there for a short time, understandably while people were running generators and we also had a large outpouring of support coming in from all over the country plus disaster relief teams. These resources needed gas too while many of us were continuing to commute to work as well. Through it all, we still had enough gas.
• Cool relief – it wasn’t the worst days of heat to lose power, but it definitely got hot. It could have been worse in that regard.
• The workers that left their families and their own towns to come help our city get back to normal quickly

Through it all, God was with us. He protected us and provided for us. It wasn’t an experience I’d want, but God has a plan for each of those impacted – to use it and strengthen them.

I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”

Psalm 91:2