This is one of those things that reassembling takes patience. I might have a pic if you can supply the model # fro the housing. My first thought is that maybe the inner control cable is broken. See if the cable can be pulled out.

Endorphinjunkie, you sure had a stimulating evening. BTW, I think you had a great evening. No wonder you can't sleep. You brain and body is trying to process all that stimulation. I'd be sitting up to the wee hours thinking about it all and fall asleep sometime in the early morning hours. This pattern does not suit the 9 to 5 working world.

Carol, I believe you are right about the majority of the damage being west of Meridian. If I remember the streets correctly, we went a block or two past Meridian and the drove south on a road I don't remember. When we got to Evergreen, we turned back east. It was on Evergreen that you really saw storm damage to the north of Meridian. On the south side of Evergreen, there was damage in pastures, but that sort of damage isn't as obvious as wrecked homes. When you drove towards Meridian on Evergreen, you passed the remains of the home (north of Evergreen and west of Meridian) where the elderly man died and his son suffered injuries that would take his life a day or so later. As we got close to Meridian, the damage was staggering. Turning from Evergreen north onto Meridian, we observed damage on both side of the street. The trailer park was on the east side of the road and it had the most damage, but houses that were on Meridian, but on the west side of the road, had spotty damage. It was like the storm hit Meridian and traveled almost, but not quite, straight up Meridian. However, it was going somewhat east of the road and as you traveled further north on Meridian, the damage was going more and more to the east of the road. I don't know if I said that well, but we first saw major damage west of Meridian on Evergreen, then on the west side of Meridian road, then on the east side of Meridian road, and then further and further east as you drove north towards Hwy 70. If a storm ever hits and I am under a carport, I hope I have that same "dumb luck". LOL EVERYONE should have a weather radio--we have three, plus our fire/police radios, and 2 out of 3 of the fire radios have the NWS channel. Tell your BIL that they also can sign up for weather alerts from KXII at the KXII website and the station will send weather alerts to their computers or cell phones. I remember the Wichita Falls tornado well. My older brother was a college student there at the time. While I do remember the massive damage quite well and, also the lives lost, what I remember most was that, when we went to WF for his college graduation 13 months after the tornado, there still was so much damage that hadn't been fixed or cleaned up. There were buildings with tarped roofs, the street lights and traffic signals all were not repaired or replaced, and rusting hulks of cars still set on right-of-way or in medians. At the time, I couldn't imagine why they hadn't cleaned up more, but now I understand it--the feds didn't help pay for clean-up back then as much as they do now, and I am sure WF was doing the best they could with the resources they had. Because the street lights had not been repaired, it was SO DARK there at night. I don't know how people drove on the pitch-black streets without having accidents constantly. After the afternoon graduation ceremony ended, my brother urged us to leave for home quickly so we could get out of WF before darkness fell. Once, when we were on vacation in south Texas, we drove past the remains of a small town, once known as Saragosa, that ceased to exist after it was wiped out by a massive multiple-vortex F-4 tornado. I think we drove through the remains of the town in the early 1990s and the tornado had hit in 1987. That tornado wiped out 85% of the town's buildings, killed 35 people and injured 121. The town only had a population of about 185 but there were extra people in town for a graduation ceremony in the community center. That community center was hit and hit hard and quite a few fatalities occurred to people inside it when it collapsed. Saragosa was a very improverished, mostly Hispanic community and almost every family opted to move away and start over someplace else. Because most of the town's inhabitants spoke ony Spanish, and warnings were issued only in English, very few people even knew there was a tornado bearing down on the town. When we drove through the town, all we saw was the remains of 1 house and a lot of concrete slabs. It was eerie. Dawn

Your location at 500 feet really made the 'mountain' look more like a 'hill', eh? I had to go look up "mountain" on Wiki. Not much there, worldwide, that's less than 1500 feet. I see Diamond Head on Waikiki is only about 700 feet, and you're looking at that from sea level. See what you've gotten me into! The Arctic Dome is rolling rapidly into our area. We've only gotten a tad of red on the pears that line our driveway. Now the leaves will just *drop*. It's been the rare year we had the full green to red to yellow.