We had one hell of a storm on Thursday.

(That’s not our tree).

We Love DC went on a little wander around my neighborhood and posted some pictures of tree damage. I just sifted through some of the storm coverage and WTOP had the best summary of the immediate aftermath:

Winds clocked 73 mph at Alexandria’s T.C. Williams High School at the height of the storm. More than 100,000 homes and businesses did not have electricity.

Alexandria Mayor Bill Euille described the storm as “the worst storm I have seen in my life. This is worse than Hurricane Isabel.”

In Del Ray, “there is not one street that you can go up or down and not see damage. It’s just unbelievable,” Euille says.

“That area was impacted tremendously with trees down across almost every street in the City of Alexandria in the Del Ray area,” says Dominion Virginia Power spokesperson Le-Ha Anderson.

Alexandria declared a State of Emergency to make clearing storm debris a priority.

The storm contained an outrageously high number of lightning strikes for a storm in this area, but for the life of me I can’t find the statistic.

It’s been in the 90s every day (98 today!) and we haven’t had trash pickup in 5 days, so you can imagine the smell of all that spoiled food in everyone’s trash cans.

Recently, we had 5 trees removed.

It was the best money we ever spent. Here’s a close-up of the tree in the center of that picture – the 100 footer with the double trunk:

It wouldn’t have taken much for any of those trees to come down, removing them was complicated and expensive as they were at the back of our property line and hence menacing several of the neighbor’s houses (seen in the background of the picture). I can’t imagine the havoc this storm would have caused if those trees hadn’t been removed.

Husband and I consider ourselves very, very lucky.