Awning damage in last night's thunderstorm

I mentioned in last night's post that we were supposed to have some thunderstorms. Boy, did we ever!! It started raining around 9:00 with thunder and lightning. We had been having really heavy rain for a while when I looked out of the window at 10:00 and realized that our awning was sagging. Oh yes, that is also the time when the electricity went off.

Even though we had the awning tilted to allow the rain water to run off and it had been, the rain was coming down so hard and fast that the rain water wasn't draining off fast enough to keep up with the downpour.

Mike went out and tried to dump the water from the awning by lifting it up with the broom, but it wasn't working. Mike finally climbed up on the ladder and pushed against the awning using his head and shoulders to lift the awning and dump the water. It worked and after about 15 minutes or so, Mike had managed to dump the water that had accumulated in the awning.

I went outside and helped Mike lower the awning and put it up, but the release lever to allow the awning to roll up was jammed and Mike had to take a hammer to loosen it. Then we