Scary stuff. A Love’s station we used to visit got hit. Various places we’re real familiar with are on the news. People in hospital, etc.
Tulrose said she was battening down. Norman, Oklahoma’s lost water, due to damage at Lake Thunderbird, and Norman, the City, and Moore have people in hospital, not to mention the property damage. That twister that showed on the Norman footage looked like an F5. Thoughts are with you guys. Jane and I have had to dive for cover way many times, and we always dodged the bullet even when it skimmed the rooftop. Hope luck has held for you and yours.
All fine on this side of town. Actually, water isn’t out — just reduced. Fortunately, I had already had my evening bath. The real irony is that the building built by OU to house both the meteorology dept. and the local offices of the Severe Storms Lab lost a whole bunch of windows. Supposedly, the building can survive a direct hit by an F5 with no structural damage. Of course, windows aren’t structural.
Anywho, it has been exciting; and it looks like more tomorrow. Fortunately, Vortex 2009 had enough warning to be well positioned, so hopefully some good will come of all this. What was really impressive was how widespread it all was.
I have a sister-in-law and 3 nephews in Dell City. I hope they’re okay. They were 1/4 mile from the one that hit OKC before and did so much damage. I can never remember the date, but keep thinking May 3, but don’t remember the year. 🙁
Del City is right with Tinker AFB, east side on I-40, and there was damage there during the Big One, but not last night, best I can figure: seems to have have hit the west side, then skipped. It was probably a different tornado that hit part of Norman. It seems to have been a ‘family’ of them.
Hope all is well with all of those in tornado alley…..sounds like it was cluster and did a lot of damage…..hope there was enough warning!
Another sad note: I just read in NY Times Update that Frank Frazetta died early Monday morning.
Just saw your note on Frank Frazetta: sad to know. He really transformed ‘cover’ art: his covers made it clear what the difference is between a photo and a painting.
Take a look at the footage available on CNN. The people who shot this are really taking a chance, and they were lucky, is all…but research has shown multiple vortices inside the big ones; and smaller funnels sometimes attend a larger one. This footage gives you quite a picture of vortices run mad.
WOW!! You have to be some kind of CRAZY to go out in that! Looks like special effects in Day After Tomorrow!
We’re fine, up here in the NE part of the state. The big ones stayed SW of us and the ones that sailed through Osage County and around Bartlesville were north. All the major damage was done by that monster on I-40. And, as usual, they hit the mobile home parks first.
I would have reported in last night but having shut everything down I left it down and went to bed.
Channel 6 / channel 9 coverage was fascinating. They’re now running a split screen with the doppler radar on one side and the view from the plane or van doing spotting on the left. So while they’re doing analysis you can actually see what it looks like. That was an absolute monster down on I-40. The plane was some miles away when they were taking pictures. And one of our vans doing spotting was dinged somewhat, no people hurt.
It’s hard for these things to hit veteran Oklahomans…the canniness of ordinary folks in figuring out how to ride through a strike is amazing.
Then there’s the crazy people in that footage. A funnel could have dropped on their heads at any moment.
So glad you folks are ok!
Thank you. The forecast is for scattered thunderstorms tonight and more coming up next weekend. As you well know, this is just weather as usual for this time of year.
It’s interesting to hear the reports – my partner grew up in Norman, and her dad worked at the National Severe Storms Lab until he retired (and moved away) a few years ago. The reports of damage at the National Weather Center don’t seem to be accurate, though – I went looking for more information and found a blog on NOAA’s site which said that while they could see damage, the building itself wasn’t damaged. (It also said that VORTEX2 was able to collect data on the Norman tornado.)
(Oops, forgot to re-set-up the gravatar image. I had to create a new account because I forgot the old password, and I recently found out that the email address I had signed up with has gone away.)
Yikes! I have cousins and great-aunts and -uncles in Duncan and Norman. They’re tough, native Oklahomans. I didn’t see the news last night. Will email or call them.
I took a fast look at GoogleMaps to verify the stricken communities. My parents were on their way back from AZ to OK on their biennial trek, and had holed up in Tulsa overnight. I talked to them yesterday evening and told them to make sure they knew where the storm shelter was for their motel!
Good to hear that the OK posters mostly came through unscathed, although I’m sorry for anyone who took damage.
Yep, if you’re driving and you see one of these coming, don’t go under a bridge: head for the bar ditch beside the road and flatten yourself as deeply into it as you can, never mind the water. Put yourself between the tornado and your car (or anybody else’s) so the car won’t land on you.
If you’re in a hotel, any inner room like a bathroom, etc.
I must have seen it a dozen times in my life—somebody in Oklahoma gets hurt in a tornado and it turns out to be some poor out-of-towner in a hotel who ran to the front windows to get a look at the tornado. Don’t do that!
If you’re caught on the road in significantly bad hail, find a gas station and get under their canopy. It has the additional bennie that if there is a tornado in the area, the gas station crowd will tend to know it, and word will pass. Any small windowless space is a pretty good shelter, and gas station bathrooms will serve. If it’s bad, hold onto the plumbing. Seriously.
It is also a bad sign if you are ripping along the interstate and you see cars turning around with their lights on, or parked along the side of the road and everybody staring at the storm ahead of them. Do not pass these cars. Pull over and find out what they know about that storm.
Hope everybody is ok who was caught on the roads, for sure!
You know you’re in tornado alley when there’s a storm warning and everyone goes out to watch. After all, it’s not a tornado watch or warning.
Another thing to watch are green tinted clouds. Tornado clouds for some reason get this dark grey-green colour.
When I first moved up from Oklahoma to Spokane, we lived where there was a corner grocery about 5 blocks down, and we often walked it. So the tv has just given a hail warning, and Jane (a NW native) blithely says, “Let’s walk down to the store.”
“Are you nuts?” quoth I. “We’re under a hail warning.” “No big deal,” Jane says. “It’ll be all right. Come on.”
We went. Hail fell. It was little styrofoam bits. NW hail. Down in Oklahoma hospitals brace when they get a hail warning. A 1-5 inch hailstone will not only dent your car, it will dent you. You can be seriously injured or killed by the big ones.
It ***is*** possible to get a dint in your hat from NW hail… but it’s rare. I collected a (measured) inch of hailstones on my deck a week ago, about bean-sized. Surely not fatal, but not very comfortable! 😀 I thought for sure my windshield was done for as I drove through the storm.
And let us not discuss the side benefits of freezing rain.
Been there, tried that, no thanks.
Even golfball-sized hail can ding up your car or your trees or your roof pretty thoroughly.
My parents’ house had a redbud out front that was nearly flattened by golfball-size hail. When I last saw it it was still getting all its bark back, several years after the event. (I think it lost two or three years of growth, just in the recovery process.)
Ohhhh, yeessss. Skidding down the highway on an inch-thick carpet of hail, too.
Not to mention the first time Jane saw a mudball rain. We were at a used book store, and it’s blowing a dust storm out, pink sky, the whole bit. Someone yells, “It’s raining,” and a guy in the store screams, “I left my windows down!”
He sprints for his car, and comes back in. He’s wearing a white shirt, and looks as if he’s been machine-gunned, with three-inch-diameter splats of dark red across his shirt.
Mudball rain.
Ya gotta see it to believe it.
Story about a woman in west Texas who had a cousin visiting from elsewhere. There was a tornado watch on for one of the region’s counties, and the TV channel was showing a little twister outline with the county name: ‘Scurry’. The cousin asked “What do you do, wait until it says ‘run like hell’?”
(I spent enough time in the basement, or coming awake bolt upright from the weather alarm, that I’m sympathetic. And very glad I’m not living in that part of the country.)
😆 The tornado belt being where it is, there are not that many square feet occupied by people, compared to say, a similar swath through New England. If New England had had that kind of weather, it would have looked like Hobbiton. As is, there’s a school down toward Chickasha or Binger that is totally underground. If it weren’t for the underground water problem and the stupidity of insurance companies who are iffy about insurance for ‘non-standard construction’, I’m sure there would be more such. I always thought it would be cool to have a house you could add onto with a pick and shovel.
Having spent much of my growing-up years working in a mine, I often wondered what it would have been like as living quarters. Even in the southern Nevada desert there was a pervasive dampness which would have been unpleasant, I think (mold, bleah)… though the year-round 54 degree air temp was awful nice when it was 110-plus in the shade (and damn little shade to be found) topside, and relatively pleasant in winter with surface temps below freezing. But dugouts were de rigueur when Granddad first came out there in the 19-teens–at least three sides of the ‘house’ dug into the hillside, and if needed, a built-up roof upon which one pitched a couple feet of dirt. That was, though, more to do with a shortage (and the cost) of timber, and in respect of the summer heat.
Tough people, our forebears!
Google “Coober Pedy” in South Australia; it is underground. You’ll see why if you look at the satellite images. It’s also where opals are mined, as is Lightning Ridge.
Down south(Marshall County) we had 3 tornados on the ground at once. I took my fiance to the office,which is bomb proof so I could go storm spot. Got to see a herd of cattle being tossed around a field. I had to later go put them down ;*( Only damage down here was a cow herd and some trees,few knocked down polls.
It looked wild, for sure.