Twisters Score Two Touchdowns on Cape Cod

Twisters Score Two Touchdowns on Cape Cod! 

I wish the pair of touchdowns were made by the young men of the Harwich (Monomy) Regional High School Football team, in a victory over Yarmouth-Dennis High School, but they were not.  

These touchdowns, nearly a first for the region, were made by a pair of twin tornadoes that blasted the Cape on Tuesday the 23rd of July, 2019, striking the lower part of the island in the town of Harwich (my summer place) and the mid-cape town of Yarmouth. 

Photo from the Pleasant Lake section of Harwich, which was about a mile away from the hardest hit areas of town.

Power was lost about noon time on Tuesday and was not restored to most of the affected area until two and a half days later. 

Monday night we were first warned of the tornado during the Red Sox game. 

By Tuesday morning we figured we were in the clear.

Mother Nature had other ideas. We were watching the news at noon, when the next warning came. Less than five seconds after the announcer said "Tornado Alert for Harwich", the power went out and an eerie stillness overspread the hillside where we live.

In an instant, it seemed as though all the air was being sucked up to the clouds. The wind picked up and small branches were plucked from the trees and sent flying into the drive way and the yard and then.... then, it was over. 

Our section of town missed being in the direct path of the twister by less than a mile. Still we did have many downed power lines as well as trees and branches. 

Though the Pleasant Lake section of Harwich, where my summer place is,  was not in the direct path of the storm we lost power for close to three days.  My group had hoped the General Store was still open and could get a hot meal and a cold drink but when we drove to the store, we got the sad news - no electricity.

This General Store is a highlight of the Harwich section of the 26 Mile Cape Cod Rail (bike) Trail. But this week, there were no wheels turning on the bike path.

We were lucky.  The storm did no damage to our property and we were not injured. With the General Store closed, we made good use of the grill during the power outage, grabbing steaks and swordfish from the freezer, and had a picnic on the deck, overlooking the branches and other debris in the back yard. The clean up would have to wait another day or two.  We were celebrating the end of the storm.

Tornadoes  are as quirky as an eccentric uncle.  They sometimes strike and leave without causing extensive damage. Others leave entire communities in total ruins with flattened buildings and swaths of devastated trees.  Power lines can be plucked from the utility poles and strewn on the ground like strands of spaghetti.  

On the bike trail by the side of Long Pond, the largest lake in Cape Cod.  It is one-twelfth

 the distance of the island and its shores stretch through both Harwich and Brewster.

Tornadoes are ranked by the carnage they leave in their wake as well as by their strength. The categories range from EF-Zero to EF-5. The twisters that blasted the Cape were EF-1, which means they were the second mildest type. The word 'mild' however does not begin to describe the destruction caused by the pair of torments.

Hundreds of trees were uprooted (some falling on to the roofs of cars, outbuildings, yard furniture etc.), a church steeple was ripped off, part of a hotel was wrenched from its foundation, power lines were yanked from utility poles, and four towns lost electrical power.  It took 900 crews from multiple locations, working round the clock, more than two days to get the utility grid back up and functioning. 

The twisters that struck Cape Cod in the Summer of 2019 were not the first to hit the island, but the 200,000 year round residents, and the many hundreds of thousands of summer people and tourists, certainly hope they are the last. 

-0-