Today a very strong line of thunderstormes barrelled its way through St. Louis, causing a lot of damage and spawning at least three tornadoes. I was driving into St. Peters (at Highways 370 and 70), an area where one of the recorded tornadoes was sighted, and was barraged by very strong winds. As I was driving, a flock of birds was flying in one direction, but actually moving in the other direction. I think I might've hit one of the birds while my car was being rocking side to side because of the wind while I was driving. There were many signs and small objects knocked over by the wind, and I noticed a few trees that were down.
Upon returning to the Seminary, I noticed an old tree that fell next to our St. Joseph's Grotto, and was informed that the power was out. We had a holy hour in candle light (plus a little bit of light from the trickle of power that remains (it's not a total blackout), but otherwise the Seminary is a very dark building right now. I took the opportunity to take a few pictures of the nighttime Seminary, without the usual artificial lighting on the tower; some of the shots were quire eerie (you can see a star in each of the shots below).
Both pictures were taken with my Canon PowerShot S2 IS camera at ISO 400, 15 second exposure, f 2.7 aperture, in superfine JPEG quality. The photos above are unedited (they are exactly how they looked after taking the pictures on my camera).
It seems that the power will be out until the afternoon, and we'll be relying on battery-powered electronics and candles until then. Luckily, candles are ever-abundant at a Seminary, so light should not be a problem!