General chaos

Today a massive storm blew through Waco while I was at work. We were warned of the storm by the weather service when it started to come into our county. A little after that, a couple of people, including a deputy, called in to report a twin tornado that was about to touch down out in the county. Fortunately, that tornado never came into Waco, but the storm definitely did. The phones went crazy with people calling in to report power lines going down and starting fires, or lightining starting fires, or trees falling onto the road and all sorts of other crazy things that are associated with storms in addition to all the regular calls. At about 9:30 our systems went down. We couldn't do anything at all with the computers down which, unfortunately, our entire operation revolves around. We had to use the manual entry cards in order to dispatch the officers and that was a bit different but still not too terribly bad. Our phones and radios still worked, so we didn't get to use the badass sat phones that we were given once the storm started to move in, but things were definitely still very different since we couldn't use our computers. Once my relief arrived at about 10:30, I got to leave which I had been told wasn't going to happen because the computers were still down. It was absolutely crazy while I was there though!