An Unexpected Disaster

At 5am this morning I woke up to tornado-force winds and the most intense lightning I have ever witnessed. So of course, my first reaction was to take a video.

At the end of filming this clip through the main door of my dorm, the power went out. Then I looked to my left and saw a large object flying by a window. My initial reaction was, "um WTF?" Then I started knocking on people's doors to wake them up and send them into the basement tunnels of the building. As I was doing this I met up with my teammate Phil, and we decided to pull the emergency tornado alarm for campus. This was a weird decision because, what if it wasn't a real emergency? Then you have 200 people panicking in the broiling hot basement, in the dark. In the end, it turned out that it was an actual disaster after all. When we went outside a couple of hours later and I realized the extent of the damage, it blew my mind. Buildings all over campus were torn apart. Pipes burst, flooding bedrooms and kitchens. People's belongings were destroyed and they had to move in with other corps members. A large portion of the roof was ripped off the main building on campus. Trees and power lines were down all over town.

One thing I will say is that the campus handled the crisis extremely well. Team leaders were on their game, corralling people, giving updates, and making sure everyone was safe and accounted for. Corps members rallied together to start cleaning up the debris around campus, and helped clean out each others' flooded rooms. And though we have to spend tonight and tomorrow night at hotels in Cedar Rapids, it seems like people are making the best of it, and NCCC staff is doing all they can to deal with the aftermath. The only injury of the day that I know of is an 11 year-old local kid named Nathan who was hanging out around campus and stepped on a nail. I spent about an hour trying to contact this kid's parents to no avail, and ended up walking him home. Which was ridonk because the poor kid had taken his shoe off and was just wearing a band-aid over his crazy bleeding foot as he hobbled a mile to his house.

It's amazing that this week we were supposed to be doing presentations on our last round projects and sitting in mid-year training sessions. Now, we'll be spending at least the next few days cleaning up after this crazy storm. Definitely did not see that one coming.