disasters

It has not been a good weekend (not for me, but for people I know)!

Early Friday morning, my grandparents' mobile home park in Florida was hit by a tornado. They are okay, but some of their neighbors were not spared by the tornado, and virtually all of the homes are severely damaged. It's odd - on one side of the street the homes are nothing by toppled lumber, but on the other they're all still standing. Grandma and Grandpa will be expediting their search for a new residence. Even though their home was not destroyed, they don't look forward to the prospect of repairing their home and continually being surrounded by construction crews who will be hauling out debris and attempting to help rebuild the community. The gravity and severity of the natural disaster was impressed upon me by Grandpa's likening of the scene to bombed out cities he worked on in Europe during World War II. That is pretty intense, and certainly not a place I would like to stay for any period of time.

This morning as I trudged through my email at work, I found out that another natural disaster (I guess that's how you'd categorize it) occurred in the building where most of my classmates do their research and where all of my classes are held. Cold temperatures and mechanical problems led to water main leaks that caused flooding in many labs! I'm not sure the extent of the damage, but about half of the building on two floors were infiltrated with water, and that likely caused some damage to electronics (like...computers with data stored on them...and incubators that keep experiments requiring cells going...and freezers that keep samples viable for later use...) and the floors and written records and all sorts of other stuff! The only good thing was that class was cancelled today, and that means I don't have to walk out in the 5F (-11F with windchill, and let me tell you that wind is NASTY!) weather.