Tornado

Apr 17, 20129 min read

Deviation Actions

Published: Apr 17, 2012

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A couple of weeks ago there was something like a tornado here in Buenos Aires.  Some areas were barely affected, but others (like the place where my country club is) were hit pretty bad.  Many reporters say that it wasn't a tornado, just an incredibly strong storm, but my father and cousin were able to see the thing a couple of times whenever lightning hit and illuminated the night.

The country club where we have our house is a very old place that has – had – some incredibly old, big and beautiful trees.  Now more than half of them are gone (some fell to the ground exposing their roots and leaving huge holes in the earth, others simply broke in half).  No one ever expected there to be a tornado in Buenos Aires, and even though the media said there would be a storm, no one knew it would be so strong.  Many of the houses there lost their roofs or were hit by trees that fell on top of them (and I'm talking about a place with relatively high income and well built houses.  Some of the impoverished areas around the country club were destroyed.

Needless to say the whole place is a disaster, we went there the morning after the storm and there were so many fallen trees blocking the roads that you simply couldn't reach the place by car.  I spent something like 40 minutes walking trying to reach the place where our horses are to see if they were ok (a walk that would normally take me about 10 minutes).  Thankfully it looks like the tornado didn't go thought that area of the country club because none of the trees there suffered any damage.  It would have been tragic if any of them had fallen over the horses whilst they were in their boxes.

Our house is in a very woody area, and about ten trees or so fell into our garden (we don't know how, but none of them fell directly over our house).  The worst damage we got was a tree that broke a little plastic roof that we had next to the "service room" (the place where the washing machine is) and a branch that broke about 100 tiles.  We really were lucky, the whole thing could have been a mess and some of our neighbors' houses were terribly affected.

For me the worst part is that a huge pine tree fell over Lo… (For those who don't know, Lo is my beloved apple tree that I've had ever since it was a seed.  I wrote a journal about Lo once, in case anyone is interested here's a bittersweet108.deviantart.com/… ).  It looks like first a branch of a pine tree flew off and hit the upper part of my apple tree, cutting it in two.  Then, as the rest of the tree fell down it hit Lo right in the base of its trunk.  It didn't cut it cleanly off, but my little tree was left against the ground.  I was so sad when I saw it, I really can't explain it.  I managed to take away all the branches that were on top of it, and straightened it up a bit.  Then over the next few days I visited the biggest nursery gardens in the area and talked with the people there, trying to find a solution.  I bought all the stuff necessary and headed back home to start working on Lo.  It looks like someone up above was smiling upon us, because when I got back there was a very old gardener (seriously, he's like a gardener sensei) working on our place and when he saw me trying to fix Lo he approached me and took over.  He did a better job than anything I could have ever done.  He's the type of person who really understands plants and after having worked most of his life amongst them, he truly has a strong connection with them.  Lo couldn't have been in better hands and I think it's really got a fighting chance (I went back to the house to visit last weekend and even though it's still in a very bad shape, one of its branches was very much alive).  I've no words to thank this man who in the middle of all the chaos left everything in order to help me save my beloved plant.  It's wonderful to know that there's such good people around and the funny thing is that this man is also my namesake

(and mine is a very weird name for a man in this country).

Everything is slowly coming back to normal, though it won't be without a cost (it's estimated that fixing the country club will cost at least US$100.000 and we'll need over 300 trucks to take away all the fallen trees). Even though this truly was a devastating thing, I'm not really mad or sad. This was all caused by nature, so in my eyes none of this can be bad and we had to understand this is the way things were supposed to go.

I did a couple of videos whilst I was there:

The first one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsJ8jn… This one shows the walk I took in order to get from the entrance of the country club all the way towards my house. At 3:49 you can see Lo as I found it

The second one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey6-GO… I took whilst I was walking towards the horses and back

Quite a sight, isn't it?

Anyway, take care everyone and I'm sorry for the long journal!

A special thanks to Compusician for the