Surprise dust storm!
This was one of the weirdest weather encounters we have ever had. All of Spokane received an emergency “Dust Storm” warnings and it was the real deal! The sky was blue and cloudy, and then suddenly it went completely brown and yellow and then we were diluged with several minutes of an absolute dust storm that passed right through us. It was like a movie set in Abu Dhabi when the sandstorm is approaching from the distance! The winds were intense, up to 40 mph. The dust turned to hail and then to a little bit of rain, and then it was completely over.
Just before it started I hustled down to the chicken coop to close up the outer door and was able to catch a few pictures. But mostly we just watched the show from the porch. After the show we proceeded to lose electricity for the next 5 hours.
Unfortunately, the orchards in Green Bluff were all gearing up to start the annual Harvest Festival of apple and pumpkin madness on this upcoming Friday. So they had tons of tents and banners and canopies set up on their properties that were absolutely demolished by this short and super intense wind and dust storm. So opening day was cancelled for most as they scramble to find alternative ways to set up their vendors and activities. It’s another difficult weather impact for this year’s small farmers!
Here comes the dust! We tucked the new camper van under the shop roof just before the dust emerged. Next month we are going to pull the camper trailer that is behind the van up just enough so that the nose of the van will be under cover. We will probably also get it some kind of front windshield/grill winter cover.
Time to break out the old Coleman lantern.
This was not expected to be a very long outage, so instead of using the whole-house generator we decided to just plug into the little portable Honda generator set on the porch.
The cat door came in quite handy for this purpose.
The only mission-critical electricity all of us required was charging up our devices. Definite fire code violation happening here. The four of us just huddled around this quagmire fo plugs for an hour or so. Then just as we were heading to bed with our partially-charged devices, the neighborhood electric was restored.
