Tornados of April 27th and Status

On Wednesday April 27, 2011, much of the southern United States was hit by one of the worst tornado storm systems in recorded history. I expect that all of you have seen some news reports about this. OAR Corporation is in Huntsville Alabama and hosts the servers and lab for the RTEMS Project. None of OAR was damaged but the main power transmission lines for north Alabama and Mississippi were destroyed by the storm. There are still areas in our county without power one week later.

My family and I went out of town after we realized it would be awhile for power to be restored. It took days at the hotel but slowly I remembered various ways to get in touch with parts of the RTEMS Community. Thursday about 5am, I managed to sent an email from my phone to a few people. Friday, we got to the hotel and I gave out news on IRC but didn’t remember to change the topic. Finally I started to [blog about it as well as post on the RTEMS Facebook and linkedin.com groups.

The power is now back at OAR and we are spending the day verifying everything is OK. The refrigerator has to be cleaned out. Some electronic devices had their batteries die during the six day outage. We think the public view of the RTEMS Project and OAR are OK now. But if you spot problems, let us know.

All in all, I am thankful that all survived without injury. I will probably write a couple of more storm related entries in my blog to clarify the state of things.](http://rtemsramblings.blogspot.com/)