Not aliens

We came to Devils Tower for the aliens. We stayed for the hail. Monday the local Devils Tower area was hit by a “supercell microburst,” a funnel cloud that formed but did not touch down.

Monday, August 19, 2024, 5:30pm. Scott is in the living room and calls for me to come out and take a look at some crazy cloud formations. Around the tower there are swirling clouds, pretty low and going in all directions. We didn’t take photos but the internet has some pretty spectacular ones. We watched the clouds and at 5:37pm I got a “Severe Thunderstorm, seek shelter, baseball sized hail” warning. Scott was tracking radar and it looked like we were going to just get the southern tail of the storm. We should have been more concerned. We did not prepare properly. We got hit. Maybe not baseball size, but definitely golf ball size. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First came the rain. We could see it come in through our living room windows, heading towards us from the southwest, just beyond the tower. We were watching it for a while, then it started getting intense. The rain was hitting us almost sideways, coming in from behind us. Scott said it was like being in a carwash. Sheets of rain, no visibility, wind registering 57mph. Then the hail started. We had some hail last summer in Colorado. This was one of the worst hailstorms I’ve been in. I don’t think I’m just saying that cause I was practically outside, but all weather does feel more intense in a vehicle. These videos were taken at 5:52 and 5:54pm, 17 minutes after receiving the warning.

(just fyi, the videos below play for us in Chrome and Safari but not Firefox)

Around 5:55pm we closed the blinds and made our way to the middle of the fifth wheel, away from those beautiful picture windows (I know the estimated time because the last picture I took was at 5:54pm). It was so loud we could hardly hear each other. Scott started moving the bedroom slide in, but had to stop mostly in because my desk was still set up and the slide can’t go in all the way while the desk is there. As I told Scott the slide was in enough, I was looking towards the living room and my eyes went wide. Scott turned to see the back window had broken and blown in and was shooting hail and leaves everywhere. Of course Scott’s desk (monitor, laptops, keyboard, etc) was still set up right up against that back window. Scott ran to the window try to do damage control and I ran to the bedroom to take apart my desk thinking we could use the wood to block the window. When I got to Scott, he was holding the shade down to cover the hole, standing on all the broken glass (both of us in bare feet, of course). He handed me his monitor and computers while I handed him my desktop (a ~4x3ft piece of wood). This part is a bit of a blur, but we tried to remove all electronics and minimize the damage. My next photo was at 6:02pm once the storm calmed down and we were trying to assess. We took a bunch of photos before we cleaned for insurance purposes. Then we started trying to get all the glass, hail, and water off the floors so we didn’t incur additional floor damage.

(By the way, we discovered new settings on the photo gallery – if you click on a photo it will open up big in a new tab!)

As you can see, the floor is covered in water, bits of glass (the black bits), and hail (biggest of which we didn’t measure but are probably golfball size). We have two fan vents, one in the main room and one in the bathroom. We also have a skylight in the bathroom. All of these were broken and leaking water inside. One of my shower plants fell and made a mess. Luckily all the water and hail that fell in the shower was contained in the shower area and drained away without damaging the floors.

I started trying to clean up inside and Scott went outside to assess the damage there.

There were some pretty big pieces of hail and the whole place was flooded with water and hail. We lost our weather station so we’re not sure how much water/ice we received, but it was up to Scott’s ankles. Betty got dented, broke her side rear mirrors, and had water damage inside the roof at the back.

Up on the roof, the Starlink sustained damage and was rattling, broken beyond repair. Our skylights/vents were broken as was this black round thing that gives us satellite tv. Luckily the solar panels seemed unharmed, except the one that had previously broken and was now completely shattered.

By about 7:30pm, Scott took our handheld saw to try to break off the rest of the bathroom skylight so we could cover it, then moved on to removing as much of the plastic covers of the sky vents so we could cover them back up. I continued cleaning inside, sweeping and mopping up, and trying to remove vent stuff from the inside. Then it started raining again. We wrapped the vents as best we could (nothing was sticking because it was still soaking wet) and called the roof done for the night.

Back inside, we continued to try to clean up. With the skylights no longer dripping water, we were mostly able to wipe up all the water, but we went through ALL our towels. Four bath towels, all the kitchen towels, whatever we could get our hands on. I went through with the dustpan/handheld broom, followed by a sopping wet towel to try to scoop everything up, followed by another towel to try to dry the floor. Scott cleared out his desk area and worked on the back window. We had some reflective wrap we had for the heat and those pieces worked well to cover all our openings. Scott tried to seal up from the outside while I tried to seal it from the inside. Around 10:30pm we had done as much cleaning as we could, tried to eat the dinner Scott had ready for us at 5:30, then tried to go to bed.

Tuesday, August 20, we took a stroll around the park. Some got hit worse than us (like the couple who had a tree fall on their vehicle), most sustained skylight damage like ours. The fellow next to us had a picnic table bash a dent in his truck. The couple on the other side of us had hail break their truck back window. The park itself was closed and everyone was out trying to assess and clean. We went to the hardware store, brought back a tarp and two rolls of duct tape to put final wraps around our holes.

After spending the day on the roof in 90 degree sunny weather, both of us were sunburnt and dehydrated. But we hope these temporary fixes will allow us to be road worthy and get to a shop to get actual repairs. In addition to the roof and back window we also have minor damage all over the fifth wheel. In my drawing below, yellow are all the places with damage.

Monday night Scott submitted claims for the fifth wheel and Betty. We’ve been contacted by agents from both. They’re going to send people to assess the damage and then we’ll find out more about what we need to fix. Luckily our deductibles are pretty low ($750 for the truck, $1000 for the fifth wheel). We’re just hoping they won’t consider either totaled because then we wouldn’t be able to insure them and we don’t think we’d be able to find replacements very easily.

We can use the wifi from the park or use our phones as hotspots, so we should be able to work, but we’re both wanting to get to Denver as soon as we can so we can get repairs taken care of. Our plan had been to get to Denver by August 31, but that’ll depend on if the insurance assessment people can get out here this week or if we have to wait til next. We can extend our stay here for another week if the insurance folks can’t make it until then. We plan to do a double driving weekend to get to Denver.

This summer has not been as fun as last summer was. Heat and a failed property search rather than visiting parks and then this chaos. Both Scott and I are looking forward to winter in Texas where we don’t need to worry about any of this tornado weather!