This is the home of my earliest memories.
I was between 3 and 5, and there are so many.
Walking in an autumn woods near our house on Pearl Street, and my mother overcome with anxiety, running toward me through the woods…I’d been lost—well, I knew where I was—and she’d feared I’d fallen into one of the mine shafts that were in the area.
Photos of me and milkbottles in the early morning, by a picket fence, and flowers.
And a very young friend named Peter, who ran up to our car as we pulled out on the move to Oklahoma: I was 5. He was about that. He gave me his favorite toy, and I protested we were going away forever, and I couldn’t give it back. He said he wanted me to have it. And I have no idea what his last name was, or what became of him.
All that’s long in the past. A tornado hit the town today, hit the hospital, killed at least 25 people: CNN says 75% of the town is virtually gone.
We had the roof on one of our middle schools blown off tonight and other structural damage throughout the city but otherwise mostly just tree damage and hail. Me, my purse, kindle, and car keys were down in the apartment laundry room for a good half hour…by myself as my neighbors must not have had their moms calling them to tell them to scramble. Sounded like my building was going through a car wash. What happened in Joplin and elsewhere (we’ve had three touchdowns in 2 years here) makes me take these things seriously. I am done with believing cities are spared and I don’t have to worry like when I lived in a small town.
A wise choice, the apartment laundry room. We were in OKC for the outbreak that included the Moore F5, and within those hours we saw others form, including one which was one of the most beautiful and most terrible sights I’ve ever seen—we stood out in our back yard and watched a tornado spin up in seconds, wrapping at least 2 miles of cloud up about itself, and then speeding off to do major damage north of us. That was an F3. We came in and heard about the F5, and we were between the two, wondering if the F5 was going to turn before it got to OKC proper—it did, to the grief of Moore, OK and Bridge Creek. But it could have plowed right into Oklahoma City. There was nothing but the vagaries of tornados, and possibly the reverberations of that F3 up by us, to prevent it.
I always dread waking up and seeing one of these news reports. Too many of my relatives live right in the path of these storms. My heart goes out to all those affected by the storms (these and the earlier ones).
I had my first experience of one of these storm systems last week; a single set of thunderstorms that ran from just west of Chicago down into central Illinois without any apparent break. We were just on the edge of it, but when we cross into the rain boundary the pressure difference was enough to pop the windows and skylights on the coach we were in. Then on arriving, getting the drill about what to do and what the different sirens meant. Every little place having signs about tuning into the radio stations and the almost obsessive use of the weather channel in every place I visited – including one place that was just wiped off the map years ago by a storm, brings it home even more.
I grew up in tornado country. I thought it was normal to spend summer nights in the basement or the fruit cellar. I don’t need to watch discovery channel to know what a twister looks like, the image is engraved in my brain, even though I personally never lost people or property to them. My most vivid memory is of being part of a group of people driving at about 90mph home from a rodeo, across flat farmland with no place to take shelter from the 2 twisters that paralleled us for at least a century, at a distance of only about 1 mile or less (it felt like they were at our elbow). They eventually pulled back up and dispersed, and all dozen or so cars slowed down and went on home to our basements.
Years later, I moved to the desert. We get dust devils here: no comparison. Still, it took years before I quit getting the old “firehorse” reaction to the summer monsoons: but Phoenix homes don’t have basements. I lay awake many nights, listening to the thunderstorms and anxious because my subconscious knew I was supposed to be under the house, not in it.
I was so sorry to hear about Joplin. These springtime storms….Here in Georgia, my family and I heard the “freight train” going through our yard last month and all huddled in the hallway. What I wouldn’t give for a basement. The F-3 missed our house by 1/5 of a mile but left a twenty-mile path of destruction. A little to the east, it would have taken our house. A little to the west, it would have wiped out our former neighborhood. The air was so charged with electricity that the sky was lit up for hours afterward with what I can best describe as a strobe-light effect. An amazing sight that I hope never to see again.
This is just terrible. My ex’s sister lives in Joplin, and while I never really liked the girl, do I hope she’s ok. Tornadoes scare the snot out of me. One of them ran through one of Chicago’s suburbs when I was in high school; a friend’s house was less than a block outside the path of damage. Terrifying things. *shudder*
What terrible news to wake up to. Joplin’s death toll is now up to at least 89. Debris from the hospital — xrays, medical records, etc — was discovered 80 miles away. I can’t imagine the devastation and the terror, including trying to hunker down in the halls trying to protect your patients.
I know what you mean by the strobe effect. I lived on the edge of OKC once: woke up to bad weather and turned on the radio in my bedroom. First thing I heard was “There goes the filling station. I’m getting out of here.”
I scrambled up and went to the back window. I saw a line of sparks in the distance and the dark, about a mile away, and realized that was a tornado in the dark, popping transformers on the way toward my back door. I grabbed the cats, shoved them into the hall closet and dragged the mattress top to the hall. Then the wisdom of the time, since disproved, said to open windows. I ran to open windows and patio door, then dived into the mattress.
Nothing happened for a while. I got curious. I got up and looked out the back door. Seeing a lime green light, and every raindrop in a deluge lit as by electric light, I wondered at how extremely slanted it was, more slanted than any rain I’d ever seen.
I wondered if it was an emergency vehicle with strobes. It almost looked like that. I ran to the front window, about 20 feet away, to see if there were others out front.
Same rain. Same light. But the slant was the OTHER direction.
Damn! I thought. The thing’s overhead.
I dived for the mattress in the hall, and about that time my ears began to feel like the worst airplane depressization you ever felt, absolutely excruciating, and I didn’t hear the freight train sound: what I heard was the squeal of nails in my roof as they were all pulled…
Not, fortunately, enough to tear the roof off. People a mile away hadn’t been so fortunate.
And why silent, outside of the general rush of rain? I have my own theory—that at that point it was a new funnel and the funnel was ‘clean,’ ie, not carrying the charge of debris it would pick up if it had ripped my roof off. I think it’s the belt-sander of debris that makes the notorious sound.
I was alone, except the cats, who were yowling in the closet. It was quite a lonely feeling.
The pressure eased up, and there was just the rain.
And I have always wondered if maybe there’s something to opening the windows. You can have wildly different pressure in different rooms, as measured in big tornadoes. But that house was just a thousand square feet total, and not being able to remember whether you opened windows facing the storm or away from it—I’d opened every window and door. Maybe that saved my roof, and me and the cats. I don’t know. We were lucky.
No feeling on earth like sitting up on the floor in the dark once that’s past and hearing just the ordinary rain.
The news on Joplin is horrible. If I had known this spring was going to be so horrible for so many people, I wouldn’t have been so eager for winter to end.
I work for the state of oklahoma in law enforcement, the news out of joplin is worse then being reported by media. Oklahoma hospitals in Tulsa and on up are past capacity with casualties from Joplin. Also Natural Gas leaks are causing raging fires now. Oklahoma has sent ALL of its First Responder Teams and Disaster Teams to aid Missouri. I’m willing to bet the death tow raises towards 200+ in the coming days once every one gets located. A Co-worker of mine is from Joplin and she left work to see how much of her family is left. Her Children’s home and the most populated area of Joplin was destroyed.
I believe you, evilwezal. I was on twitter monitoring my own storm when I started hearing stuff out of Joplin about it being really bad. People were actually tweeting requests for medical people to come into the city. That was all on twitter. It took CNN.com two hours to get anything up at all, substantial or not. They were all still talking about Oprah. Weather.com was the only national news to get info out early outside of twitter trending worldwide. CNN still doesn’t seem to be up to speed comparatively.
Oh, yes. I know that pressure dropping/ear popping/stomach sinking feeling. The first thing you think is “Oh, (expletive of choice)!” and the next thing you think is “where is it and which way is it going.” The second of the two F5’s that hit Lubbock missed our little garage apartment by less than fifty feet. Pulled the house next door to the east of us down on the lady who lived there and killed her. Our roof had two 2 x 4’s shot clean through it that had to be hammered out from inside the attic — debris from the totally trashed apartment complex next door to the west of the house our “garage” belonged to. The house had broken pieces of glass and splinters of wood all peppered through the sideing. Ripped the entire roof off the apartment building across the alley from us, and made matchsticks out of their furniture. It was the longest 3 minutes of my life! What kept the death toll under thirty was that it hit at night and most of the worst destruction was to the downtown area. My heart goes out to the people of Joplin and their loved ones.
They say that this year, thanks to La Nina, will be a low count one for hurricanes. I think the wacky weather is just getting geared up, and am making sure our bug-out kit is armed and ready. We’ve already used it once this year.
My God, what a nightmare…I bet you’re right about the debris causing the sound. The tornado that threatened us stayed on the ground through three counties. We were in county number two.
I keep trying to think of words to express my feelings about it. Telling someone “I’m so sorry for your loss” sums it up so inadequately, but there just don’t seem to be any words that are up to the job. As bad as it is to lose your own home, or someone in your own family, you usually have the support of your community in such a time. When your whole neighborhood or town is devastated, your community gets bigger in a way, because we all want to reach out to support each other, but the comfort of strangers just isn’t the same. I guess all we can do is shed tears together, when the words won’t do.
I agree. It’s the measure of a community’s character, if, when disaster strikes, they don’t run away: they run to help each other.
I went to Oklahoma City today and got stuck in between 3 tornadoes, at one point 2 were headed for bricktown were I happend to be. My Fiance and I decided to eat at Zios on the Canal and watch the twisters come in lol. Figured we would have one last good meal. Luckly the twisters went father to the east and did alot of damage there. We returned to southern oklahoma to find our town had been hit by a down burst and damaged large sections of town….gotta love oklahoma lol.
Springtime is an adrenaline rush. So much about the storm weather is beautiful, indescribably strange, and fascinating—and then you realize it’s coming your direction.
When we arrived in Brick Town the streets were packed with tourists and out of towners that had come for the Mavs vs Thunder Games. The Tornado Sirens started going off and you would have thought we were being bombed. You could literally tell who was from Oklahoma and who was a tourists with no experience with tornadoes. People started running around like scared chickens with the locals going calmly about there business, alot of locals were directing the tourists into the hotel underground parking areas. We paid our parking fee and went into Zios. The Touristy crowd was leaving with a few of us locals were going in. The restaurant had turned the Flat Screen Tvs over to the local weather and we ate our food while watching the weather reports from Geary England lol. When we left OKC was a ghost town, no rush hour traffic and I-35 had few cars as we made our way home.
I’m glad I wasn’t one of the tourists, although they were very lucky to have such considerate locals to help them. It’s amazing what we get used to, isn’t it? Growing up in Florida, the occasional hurricane was a fact of life. We all knew the ways to prepare for them and we did so – and we didn’t stay near any large body of water. However, the first time my raised-in-Georgia husband saw the “Hurricane Evacuation Route” signs, he was ready to flee the state, poor guy, even though it wasn’t hurricane season. I was so used to seeing them, I hadn’t given it a thought.