It may have made the news near you, but my city got hit with a couple tornadoes on Friday.  First time in 25 years.

It’s an oddly built city, with a sister city just across the river (in another province), a we’re in a valley.  This makes for interesting storm paths that hit the west end of the city, cross the river, hit that city, then come back to this side farther in the east.  I live on top of a hill, which is often spared the brunt of any large storm.  I saw the black clouds and a bit of heavy wind… but that’s it.

Luckily there were no fatalities, and just 6 critical injuries.  Power was lost to half the city for most of the weekend, with just over 5,000 left impacted on Monday.  The majority of the city is closed today to allow people to worry about their family and homes, rather than office work.  Except the french school board, but that’s a different topic.

No one on my team was directly impacted, but quite a few of their family members were.  That’s some good news.  My friends and family are mostly unaffected, except for a few with power issues.  That’s also some good news.

I work in IT.  We have multiple data centers in this city, as it’s the core of our operations.  A lot of those centers offer critical services both internally and to clients, so it was an all-hands on deck type of weekend.  Disaster recovery plans are the types of plans you never want to execute, but are glad that you have when you need them.  It’s impressive how thorough and passionate people can be during these types of events.   More than happy with what my team pulled through this weekend, and what the organization was able to do given the circumstances.

Now we start the period of rebuilding.   And to see what kind of help we can provide.