A trip to my old stompinng grounds and some pics of tornado damage

A while back I posted about how the university I attended for grad school received extensive damage from a tornado in March. On Friday, my sister graduated form the same university and I got to see parts of campus for myself.

Normally, Spring graduation is held in the coliseum; however, since it received extensive damage from the tornado, they moved graduation to the football stadium. I've been wondering when Spring will show up and I think I received the answer loud and clear on Friday. The answer? Never! At least not until next year. Summer has kindly - or not depending on your view - taken Spring's place. We won't get another chance at perfect weather until Autumn, which will probably last two days at the end of October or beginning of November.

Graduation was hot. I look better today, but I spent most of my weekend as a perfectly steamed lobster. Beyond getting to support my sister, the upside of all the heat was that I got to take some pictures of campus. Campus looks so much better than it did six weeks ago. They have cleaned up much debris and have already begun construction on many of the buildings that were damaged.

The university said that 50 of the 70 buildings on campus received tornado damage. My pictures below are but a small snippet of the damage that still exists around campus and around the community as a whole. Many homes were completely flattened. I hate to say "enjoy these pictures" but it always fascinating to see how a tornado can completely damage one part of a structure and leave the other part completely untouched.

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This is the library. You can see that chunks of the roof and the top floor were taken off. There's a smallish study place on the top floor and balcony surrounding that.

On the shuttle headed back to the parking lot we used (unfortunately, most pictures were taken while I was in a vehicle of some sort). These are some on-campus apartments.

This building was home to the School of Business. I read that it was considered a total loss.

This picture gives a little better view into the extent of the destruction. You can see sunlight pouring through what used to be the roof.

The next few pictures come from the area across the road from the business building. I can't quite put my finger on what used to be here but there definitely used to be more than dirt and tree limbs.

This used to be a pretty heavily wooded area.

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Overall, I was very impressed with how much work has been done. A lot of volunteers helped pull that off, and while it's not the most devastation I've seen from a tornado, it certainly hits a lot closer to home.