@tinamarie1974 yes…it was just spooky…i’ve been through numerous hurricanes…but this was more intense…minor warning (sirens 30 or so minutes before vs 2-3 days notice)…and honestly - this came super close…we were lucky enough to be in a rectangle of streets that was just missed…there was a giant mess of trees, houses, and buildings destroyed just outside of that…counting my blessings that the worst was power out…and thankfully its just come back on now…
Yeah it came close to my apartment as well. Luckily, we’re only without power.
Story:
So like any good idiot, the sirens go off for the tornado warning and I immediately go outside to see something. It’s not bad for a couple minutes (siren going off all around us, even in other towns) and then I thought I saw it in one of the numerous flashes of lightning. The wind really suddenly picked up so I took off (like a 40 year old overweight bat out of hell) bounding two or three stairs at a time up the steps to my apartment and to yell to my wife “put some socks and shoes on and get in the bathtub!” I go back outside real quick to consider moving my car, and it is getting worse exponentially so I turn around and my wife is sitting on the floor trying to find matching socks in the closet. She has never seen or experienced a tornado so she didn’t understand why I was telling her to throw socks on. At the time I was pissed as I grabbed her shoes and our wallets to potentially die in the same place that I wash my genitals… but retrospect it was pretty funny.
Sounds like you both got very lucky. They are scary. I got missed by a half a block once. Saw one out my car window once while living here the first time. And was missed by about 5 miles with the first force 5 Moore Oklahoma one. When I moved out of tornado alley I was so relieved. Hope this isn’t something either of you have to deal with very often. Glad you both are ok.
@Kidsandliz@amehzinggrace. I’m not sure about amehzinggrace but being a transplant I’ve never really seen one before but once I realize it’s a potential I starting looking for stuff just in case. I’ve been in Texas since 2011 or so and it seems to be getting worse.
@Kidsandliz@Targaryen tbh… this is the first time I’ve noticed it…i guess it was always in other areas of Dallas so i didn’t really pay attention… this was close to home… literally… so definitely made an impact… not being from here either I’m not all that familiar with a tornado past “the wizard of oz”
@amehzinggrace@Targaryen One of the things I found I did each time I lived in tornado alley (live where are some now - in fact later today they will be a risk) is always paying attention when there were thunder storms, the sky looked dark or odd… I always had one eye on the sky as a force of habit.
When I moved to northern ID and they barely even had thunderstorms there I didn’t realize how that was always hanging over my head, how I watched the sky until it wasn’t necessary any more. Took me a while to stop paying attention beyond, “do I need an umbrella” type of paying attention. It was like a weight had lifted. Now I am back to - where will it be safe, can I round up the cats fast enough…
It is worth having your phone set so that it warns you if there is a tornado warning, watch, etc. Around most places I have lived that had sirens you can’t always hear them from everywhere. And the sirens are a last minute type of warning. I find that I want to know if there will be a risk of them prior to when sirens would be going off just so I know to pay attention throughout the day.
@Kidsandliz this may not be true in everyone’s state but at least here you can go to the county emergency Management agency website to sign up for alerts. They use nixle around here. When there is a storm coming they preposition volunteer spotters who have gone through training to spot tornadoes. They also test the sirens once a month to make sure they work. So you kinda learn where you can hear them from.
@Kidsandliz Was that the cat 5 in the early 2000s? Just south of Oklahoma City? If it was, I lived in Wichita Falls at the time and made a trip shortly after to OK City and saw all the devastation. I’ll also never forget that storm. It was the most intense storm I’ve ever been in. Like others, moving out tornado alley was a huge relief and I’ve been lucky enough to have no reason to move back. How do people live the constant threat of death and destruction?!
@Gypsigirl213 Yes it was. And originally it was supposed to hit south of where it did. The flashes of lightening on TV matched what was happening in the sky. For people not familiar with this storm it was on the ground for 90 miles and moved an airplane wing nearly as far. Foundations were swept clean. Literally. A third of the town was completely wiped out. Gone except for piles or rubble and cement foundations. It was amazing no one was killed - on the other hand there was lots of warning.
A couple of years after I moved one went through my neighborhood and took out completely the house on the corner (along with much of the next block up - eg away from where I had lived), the house next to that was damaged fairly heavily and the house I had lived in lost the shed and much of the roof. So glad I was gone from there. Well I would imagine people manage to live there as most of the time you don’t get hit by a tornado… in some respects it is no different than living in earthquake zones or hurricane zones (well except with hurricanes you have time to run away even though you still might lose everything).
@Gypsigirl213@Kidsandliz one of my good friends’ family lost everything in Moore that day. Everything except each other. So now they remember the day, almost like a birthday, as the day they survived together.
@djslack@Gypsigirl213 That must have been horrific for them. When I drove past that it was horrifying to see. Foundations literally swept clean - blocks and blocks and blocks. Made me wonder how the hell people had survived if they had stayed in their house. So many houses there was literally nothing left. A third of that town was wiped out. There was a giant run on tornado shelters all around the area after that. I read that Moore got hit again with a bad one several years back. That likely triggered a bit of PTSD with some folks there.
My kid was with me as we were headed to OKC for something and so saw that. It freaked her out for several years each time there was a tornado warning. She wasn’t convinced it was a tornado as she thought it had been a bomb (she had lived in a war zone and lived though some bombing of the refugee camp she was in; she’d adopted). It had crossed the highway so there wasn’t even a back road to take to get to where we were going so I could have kept her from seeing the carnage.
When it went through both the east/west and north/south highways were shut down for an incredible number of hours. Someone had said the traffic was backed up half way to Texas. I don’t know if that was true but it was backed up through way, way south of where I lived.
Another year one went through, I think it was, Edmond and hit the amusement park. While it was open and full of people (although with the warning people were leaving). It, again, was sheer luck that only a few people were hurt. OKC seemed to get several, mostly on the north side of town, each year I lived around there.
@djslack@Kidsandliz It did look like the area got bombed to ground. I’d never seen anything like IRL until then and it was shocking in person versus on the news. That poor family. I can’t even imagine losing everything like that. I’ll never forget the strength of that storm. It was jarring how intense Mother Nature can be.
After going through that epic and historic storm in Wichita Falls, I moved to Alaska and in 2002 went through a 7.9 earthquake. The strongest one ever recorded in interior Alaska. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Denali_earthquake
I was only 60 miles from the epicenter (very close in earthquake terms). Roads were torn apart. My house got all kinds of funky cracks. I had been used to earthquakes by the point as they happened regularly, but were usually just some quick rumbling. When that 7.9 hit, I was asleep, it woke me up and as I’d been woken up by them countless times, I laid there and waited for it to pass. But it didn’t. It kept getting stronger. To the point where it got scary. It lasted forever. I had time to get up, get quickly dressed, go downstairs, and get outside to open field. Another epic and historic act of nature survived.
Then, in 2005 I moved to Vacaville CA. Just in time to survive the worst flood in over 100 years. https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/STORMS-AND-FLOODS-USHER-IN-THE-NEW-YEAR-THE-2507516.php
Another epic and historic act of nature that caused devastation and destruction. I was living in an RV at the time and was asleep when someone started banging on the door. I woke up and heard rushing water like being near a river, but there was no water nearby. I opened the RV door and the water was as high as the top step and rising. If you know anything RVs, you know they plug into a power post by a thick special cable. So, before I could leave the sewage line and power plug had to be disconnected. Luckily I was married at the time so the ex had to do that, but it scary sending him out there into waste-deep water to mess a power and sewer line. I didn’t know at the time that the power had already been knocked out.
Prior to the 1999 tornado, the 2002 earthquake, and the 2005 flood, I had been through two hurricanes, so by the time I lived through the flood I was convinced I was cursed. That anywhere I moved to destruction would follow.
Then in 2010, only a week after I moved to Nashville, this happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Tennessee_floods An epic and historic flood devastated middle Tennessee.
I haven’t moved since. Partly out of finally settling down and partly from fear. Tho, I’m seriously considering going back to full-time RV life when I finish my masters degree next year. I miss being on the road, but nowadays with cell phones and distracted driving, I’m a bit scared get back out there. In the early 2000s this wasn’t problem like it is today.
I have never heard the tornado sirens around here, even though I’ve been through several coming nearby. A few months ago my mom was at the dentist when one came through and she said she finally heard the sirens. I was in my office way up in the tallest building around looking out the window until the windows started visibly flexing. Too high to hear anything on the ground.
@djslack Yeah I was in a tall glass building when there was a tornado warning. I decided to leave the building. The tornado was on the ground for a while so we had some warning. I decided to run home, gather the cats up and either flee if it was still far away or hunker down at home. Figured it was safer than a building where the entire outside was pretty much glass. It was tracking down the main street I lived a block off of; where my work was only about 2 blocks off of. When I crossed the highway I saw it behind me out the driver window. I was by the golf course nearly home and the wind started picking up big time and big tree branches started to land on the road I was on. No where to head south to get away from it.
Heard on the radio it was pretty much on track to hit my street and it sounded like at that point it was marginally ahead of where I was so I decided to keep heading home. Then they said it was slightly off the ground. I was driving through the apartment complex street right in front of where Iived and saw it, twice, swirl and head down again (but not hit the ground) right over where my short street would roughly be behind the apts. Didn’t hit the ground again until the reservoir which was about a 1/2 mile past my house but tons of tree branches and trees down where I lived. My next door neighbor said it was directly overhead (now why she was outside filming it on her phone instead of inside hiding I will never know),Probably the stupidest thing I had done in a while - driving parallel to the tornado hoping to beat it home to save my cats (my kid was in school). I was really lucky.
Another time (in the greater Norfolk, VA area) a water spout (tornado over the water) came ashore. My house (I was inside and it terrified a different bunch of cats for life about thunder storms) vanished into a lightening ball according to my neighbor who had been on her porch (there was no warning about this). All windows suddenly had no view out - pure opaque white, house shook hard as thunder and lightening were the same time, and it touched down hitting the house right behind me. Only damaged 10 houses before it vanished. Only a few slate tiles off the roof, the lightening rod melted, some pictures fell off the wall, but amazingly no melted wiring and no damaged electronics.
Are you ok?
@tinamarie1974 yes…it was just spooky…i’ve been through numerous hurricanes…but this was more intense…minor warning (sirens 30 or so minutes before vs 2-3 days notice)…and honestly - this came super close…we were lucky enough to be in a rectangle of streets that was just missed…there was a giant mess of trees, houses, and buildings destroyed just outside of that…counting my blessings that the worst was power out…and thankfully its just come back on now…
It’s not that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind is blowing.
-Ron White
@therealjrn He was joking about passing gas.
@medz Ha ha. No.
@medz @therealjrn True, but in a tornado, what the wind is blowing are projectiles…
Amehzinggrace, very glad to hear you made it through OK.
@therealjrn That is his best line ever! I think of it every time we have strong winds.
Yeah it came close to my apartment as well. Luckily, we’re only without power.
Story:
So like any good idiot, the sirens go off for the tornado warning and I immediately go outside to see something. It’s not bad for a couple minutes (siren going off all around us, even in other towns) and then I thought I saw it in one of the numerous flashes of lightning. The wind really suddenly picked up so I took off (like a 40 year old overweight bat out of hell) bounding two or three stairs at a time up the steps to my apartment and to yell to my wife “put some socks and shoes on and get in the bathtub!” I go back outside real quick to consider moving my car, and it is getting worse exponentially so I turn around and my wife is sitting on the floor trying to find matching socks in the closet. She has never seen or experienced a tornado so she didn’t understand why I was telling her to throw socks on. At the time I was pissed as I grabbed her shoes and our wallets to potentially die in the same place that I wash my genitals… but retrospect it was pretty funny.
@Targaryen Was your wife wearing any other clothes? (Glad you’re okay.)
@Targaryen why the socks and shoes?
@moonhat @Targaryen Because she had her name printed on them in case she got lost.
@Targaryen glad you guys were ok!!
@Targaryen also I think it is cute that she wanted her socks to match
@Barney Haha yeah she was studying, thanks!.
@Moonhat in case of broken glass, nails etc from damage.
@tinamarie1974 Me too, Thanks!
@Barney @Targaryen ahhh ok
@moonhat at the very least, put a pair of flip flops in your survival kit. Nobody wants to wander around a disaster area without shoes.
@medz @moonhat A lesson we should have all learned from watching Die Hard.
Sounds like you both got very lucky. They are scary. I got missed by a half a block once. Saw one out my car window once while living here the first time. And was missed by about 5 miles with the first force 5 Moore Oklahoma one. When I moved out of tornado alley I was so relieved. Hope this isn’t something either of you have to deal with very often. Glad you both are ok.
@Kidsandliz @amehzinggrace. I’m not sure about amehzinggrace but being a transplant I’ve never really seen one before but once I realize it’s a potential I starting looking for stuff just in case. I’ve been in Texas since 2011 or so and it seems to be getting worse.
@Kidsandliz @Targaryen tbh… this is the first time I’ve noticed it…i guess it was always in other areas of Dallas so i didn’t really pay attention… this was close to home… literally… so definitely made an impact… not being from here either I’m not all that familiar with a tornado past “the wizard of oz”
@amehzinggrace @Targaryen One of the things I found I did each time I lived in tornado alley (live where are some now - in fact later today they will be a risk) is always paying attention when there were thunder storms, the sky looked dark or odd… I always had one eye on the sky as a force of habit.
When I moved to northern ID and they barely even had thunderstorms there I didn’t realize how that was always hanging over my head, how I watched the sky until it wasn’t necessary any more. Took me a while to stop paying attention beyond, “do I need an umbrella” type of paying attention. It was like a weight had lifted. Now I am back to - where will it be safe, can I round up the cats fast enough…
It is worth having your phone set so that it warns you if there is a tornado warning, watch, etc. Around most places I have lived that had sirens you can’t always hear them from everywhere. And the sirens are a last minute type of warning. I find that I want to know if there will be a risk of them prior to when sirens would be going off just so I know to pay attention throughout the day.
@Kidsandliz this may not be true in everyone’s state but at least here you can go to the county emergency Management agency website to sign up for alerts. They use nixle around here. When there is a storm coming they preposition volunteer spotters who have gone through training to spot tornadoes. They also test the sirens once a month to make sure they work. So you kinda learn where you can hear them from.
@Kidsandliz Was that the cat 5 in the early 2000s? Just south of Oklahoma City? If it was, I lived in Wichita Falls at the time and made a trip shortly after to OK City and saw all the devastation. I’ll also never forget that storm. It was the most intense storm I’ve ever been in. Like others, moving out tornado alley was a huge relief and I’ve been lucky enough to have no reason to move back. How do people live the constant threat of death and destruction?!
@Gypsigirl213 Yes it was. And originally it was supposed to hit south of where it did. The flashes of lightening on TV matched what was happening in the sky. For people not familiar with this storm it was on the ground for 90 miles and moved an airplane wing nearly as far. Foundations were swept clean. Literally. A third of the town was completely wiped out. Gone except for piles or rubble and cement foundations. It was amazing no one was killed - on the other hand there was lots of warning.
A couple of years after I moved one went through my neighborhood and took out completely the house on the corner (along with much of the next block up - eg away from where I had lived), the house next to that was damaged fairly heavily and the house I had lived in lost the shed and much of the roof. So glad I was gone from there. Well I would imagine people manage to live there as most of the time you don’t get hit by a tornado… in some respects it is no different than living in earthquake zones or hurricane zones (well except with hurricanes you have time to run away even though you still might lose everything).
@Gypsigirl213 @Kidsandliz one of my good friends’ family lost everything in Moore that day. Everything except each other. So now they remember the day, almost like a birthday, as the day they survived together.
@djslack @Gypsigirl213 That must have been horrific for them. When I drove past that it was horrifying to see. Foundations literally swept clean - blocks and blocks and blocks. Made me wonder how the hell people had survived if they had stayed in their house. So many houses there was literally nothing left. A third of that town was wiped out. There was a giant run on tornado shelters all around the area after that. I read that Moore got hit again with a bad one several years back. That likely triggered a bit of PTSD with some folks there.
My kid was with me as we were headed to OKC for something and so saw that. It freaked her out for several years each time there was a tornado warning. She wasn’t convinced it was a tornado as she thought it had been a bomb (she had lived in a war zone and lived though some bombing of the refugee camp she was in; she’d adopted). It had crossed the highway so there wasn’t even a back road to take to get to where we were going so I could have kept her from seeing the carnage.
When it went through both the east/west and north/south highways were shut down for an incredible number of hours. Someone had said the traffic was backed up half way to Texas. I don’t know if that was true but it was backed up through way, way south of where I lived.
Another year one went through, I think it was, Edmond and hit the amusement park. While it was open and full of people (although with the warning people were leaving). It, again, was sheer luck that only a few people were hurt. OKC seemed to get several, mostly on the north side of town, each year I lived around there.
@djslack @Gypsigirl213 @Kidsandliz Okay, what woke @mediocrebot?
@djslack @Gypsigirl213 @mediocrebot @OldCatLady He arrived at work and decided this thread needed the “human” touch?
@djslack @Kidsandliz It did look like the area got bombed to ground. I’d never seen anything like IRL until then and it was shocking in person versus on the news. That poor family. I can’t even imagine losing everything like that. I’ll never forget the strength of that storm. It was jarring how intense Mother Nature can be.
After going through that epic and historic storm in Wichita Falls, I moved to Alaska and in 2002 went through a 7.9 earthquake. The strongest one ever recorded in interior Alaska. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Denali_earthquake
I was only 60 miles from the epicenter (very close in earthquake terms). Roads were torn apart. My house got all kinds of funky cracks. I had been used to earthquakes by the point as they happened regularly, but were usually just some quick rumbling. When that 7.9 hit, I was asleep, it woke me up and as I’d been woken up by them countless times, I laid there and waited for it to pass. But it didn’t. It kept getting stronger. To the point where it got scary. It lasted forever. I had time to get up, get quickly dressed, go downstairs, and get outside to open field. Another epic and historic act of nature survived.
Then, in 2005 I moved to Vacaville CA. Just in time to survive the worst flood in over 100 years. https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/STORMS-AND-FLOODS-USHER-IN-THE-NEW-YEAR-THE-2507516.php
Another epic and historic act of nature that caused devastation and destruction. I was living in an RV at the time and was asleep when someone started banging on the door. I woke up and heard rushing water like being near a river, but there was no water nearby. I opened the RV door and the water was as high as the top step and rising. If you know anything RVs, you know they plug into a power post by a thick special cable. So, before I could leave the sewage line and power plug had to be disconnected. Luckily I was married at the time so the ex had to do that, but it scary sending him out there into waste-deep water to mess a power and sewer line. I didn’t know at the time that the power had already been knocked out.
Prior to the 1999 tornado, the 2002 earthquake, and the 2005 flood, I had been through two hurricanes, so by the time I lived through the flood I was convinced I was cursed. That anywhere I moved to destruction would follow.
Then in 2010, only a week after I moved to Nashville, this happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Tennessee_floods An epic and historic flood devastated middle Tennessee.
I haven’t moved since. Partly out of finally settling down and partly from fear. Tho, I’m seriously considering going back to full-time RV life when I finish my masters degree next year. I miss being on the road, but nowadays with cell phones and distracted driving, I’m a bit scared get back out there. In the early 2000s this wasn’t problem like it is today.
I have never heard the tornado sirens around here, even though I’ve been through several coming nearby. A few months ago my mom was at the dentist when one came through and she said she finally heard the sirens. I was in my office way up in the tallest building around looking out the window until the windows started visibly flexing. Too high to hear anything on the ground.
@djslack
… that’s never a good sign!
@djslack Yeah I was in a tall glass building when there was a tornado warning. I decided to leave the building. The tornado was on the ground for a while so we had some warning. I decided to run home, gather the cats up and either flee if it was still far away or hunker down at home. Figured it was safer than a building where the entire outside was pretty much glass. It was tracking down the main street I lived a block off of; where my work was only about 2 blocks off of. When I crossed the highway I saw it behind me out the driver window. I was by the golf course nearly home and the wind started picking up big time and big tree branches started to land on the road I was on. No where to head south to get away from it.
Heard on the radio it was pretty much on track to hit my street and it sounded like at that point it was marginally ahead of where I was so I decided to keep heading home. Then they said it was slightly off the ground. I was driving through the apartment complex street right in front of where Iived and saw it, twice, swirl and head down again (but not hit the ground) right over where my short street would roughly be behind the apts. Didn’t hit the ground again until the reservoir which was about a 1/2 mile past my house but tons of tree branches and trees down where I lived. My next door neighbor said it was directly overhead (now why she was outside filming it on her phone instead of inside hiding I will never know),Probably the stupidest thing I had done in a while - driving parallel to the tornado hoping to beat it home to save my cats (my kid was in school). I was really lucky.
Another time (in the greater Norfolk, VA area) a water spout (tornado over the water) came ashore. My house (I was inside and it terrified a different bunch of cats for life about thunder storms) vanished into a lightening ball according to my neighbor who had been on her porch (there was no warning about this). All windows suddenly had no view out - pure opaque white, house shook hard as thunder and lightening were the same time, and it touched down hitting the house right behind me. Only damaged 10 houses before it vanished. Only a few slate tiles off the roof, the lightening rod melted, some pictures fell off the wall, but amazingly no melted wiring and no damaged electronics.