ryan susie ethan & lilly

Yesterday our city and surrounding areas were hit extremely hard by a supercell thunderstorm. There were wind gusts clocked around 100MPH out at the Provo Airport. I was at the mall with Ethan playing when we heard the storm start to pass over our heads. It was rather loud but it was hard to tell how bad it was inside the mall. Ethan and I played a bit more until I realized that I had left our sunroof cracked open. So we ran back to the car and headed home.

We called Susie to see if she was watching the storm (she loves storms!)…when we got hold of her it was only for a moment then the line cut off. It wasn’t until we got to Provo that we knew something bad had happened. There were trees down everywhere. The power was off. Cars up on the sidewalks. When we finally got to our street there were massive trees down and the building across the street from us had its roof ripped off.

Susie said the storm hit so quickly she only had time to shut one of our windows. As she was shutting that very window, she saw a large tree go down across the street and felt our house shake like a train was going through it. So she grabbed Lilly and ran as fast as she could to the basement. (this was about the time that I first called her on our way home from the mall). Turns out I had left our laundry room window wide open to let fresh air in that day. The room was soaked from ceiling to floor with over an inch of water pooling up in about 3minutes on the floor.
This was one of the most serious storms to hit Utah in many decades - its overall destructive power had a much more wide spread effect than the small F1 tornado that hit Salt Lake City a few years ago.

Here is a photo gallery with almot 100 photos of the storm’s aftermath in and around Provo.

We will post photos of destruction right across the street from us shortly.

We’re happy that everyone is safe and glad our house was lucky not to get hit by debris.