They’ve been hit again by a terrible, massive tornado.
Jane and I were in OKC for the 1999 outbreak, and this one followed almost the identical track, except that it missed Tinker. This is a terrible mess.
Thinking of you, friends and relations in OKlahoma.
Sister-in-Law, three nephews in Del City. They’re okay. I heard they got the kids out of the school all right. Nonetheless, no place on this earth is safe from some type of natural disaster. You could live in Florida and deal with hurricanes, in Bangladesh with cyclones, in Turkey with earthquakes, in Switzerland with avalanches, in Indonesia with volcanoes, on any seashore with tsunami, and with blizzards in the northern/southern reaches of the temperate zones. We learn to live with our surroundings, to recognize the warning signs, and to understand what we need to do in order to remain safe.
At last report from my nephew, there were 75 dead in Moore. S-I-L lived about a 1/4 mile from where the EF5 in 1999 went through. I remember some of the places I’d visited in 1998 when I came out to see my brother, especially there at Tinker.
IR satellite view of OK this afternoon. That’s the Red River at the bottom. There are a couple of people at Daily Kos who cover weather, and weatherdude is one of them.
I was in an F5, and it’s an experience you don’t ever forget. (To this day, there are certain low rumbling noises that give me cold chills.) My heart goes out to those who lost loved ones and who suffered property damage.
Best wishes, hopes and prayers. The news coverage is just horrific. I grew up in California and remember feeling LA quakes at a remove (big mountain range in between but the bed still zipped across the floor). The idea of tornadoes scares me silly. Again, my prayers for all concerned.
I will say that earthquakes don’t leave your house and everything you own scattered across miles of landscape. That may be the only good thing about them.
But seeing aerial pictures of Moore – where it went through, there’s just piles of broken wood and stuff, where you can tell there had been houses. (Some of them not even much of that left.) Half of Plaza Towers school is just bare concrete.
Been in a category 2 typhoon and an earthquake at the same time, on Guam. Not fun, but at least, the quake was a very short one, kind of a sine wave like cracking a jump rope up and down.
For those of you who are trying to get messages to OKC, you might see if a local amateur radio operator in your area can relay a message to and from there. They cannot charge you anything for the service, and while it’s not as quick as say, a telephone, it doesn’t jam up the telephone lines. They’re necessarily brief, to the point, and that’s it, but sometimes, they also have the operators there at the disaster site sending messages out for the people who are there who want to reassure their loved ones that things are all right. You hear mostly about it with major disasters like the Haiti earthquake, or Japan, but it is alive and well in this country, too. You can get a list of hams by checking http://www.qrz.com and selecting your zip code. (I think that feature still works.) Otherwise, ask me, I’ve got access to every callsign up to about the beginning of this month, and can access even the new ones, too.
Native Angelino myself. Sylmar, Northridge, Palm Desert, etc.; felt ’em all. Very familiar with the tectonics of So. Calif.
Now around Portland, OR, which had the last of a dozen R9 subduction zone earthquakes on Jan 26, 1700, on the scale of Japan’s recent Tohoku Earthquake.
Spokane is right in the downwind track from Mt St Helens 1980 eruption. In 1985 I drove from Morton, WA, to Lethbridge, AB, along I90 from Ellensburg to Cour d’Alene and there was still whitish ash all along the shoulders five years later.
There’s nowhere “safe”.
Oh! I graduated from Sylmar High. A LONG time ago. Grew up between San Fernando and Sioux City, Iowa. Parents just kept moving back and forth, back and forth.
And you are right; no where is safe. (Almost wrote nowhere is safe — which might be true, too, if we could find it.)
I have been in Nebraska for 30 years. I miss the ocean and the desert. But not the city. LOL
THere’s a site where you can check on welfare or report yourself safe: http://www.safeandwell.org will let you either report or search, if you have friends in the area.
We’ve heard from our friends in the OKC area, and except for lack of power here and there, they all appear to be fine. Great relief after a day like this. Russ flew back from New York today too. He was there to teach a weekend class.
There’s a sound clip that was taken on cell, I think, by a guy at the KFC, that actually captures the famous ‘locomotive’ sound…I’ve been ‘in’ one that grazed my roof, and the thing I remember was no-sound, and acute pain as the pressure drop got my ears, that and every nail in the roof structure screaming as it was pulled a bit—thank God my roof stayed on. But just north of my house, about 2000 feet away, the storm dropped a huge metal/neon sign from a restaurant 10 miles away.
The meteorologist says the locomotive sound is actually produced by the tornado sucking air in…which it can do very, very fast. Jane and I, the day of the big one in Moore,in 1999, stood on our back patio watching as an F3 tornado forming about 3 miles away began to suck in a layer of cloud that was over our heads—wound it up like a dancer’s skirts so fast it really was like a spinning dancer.
One of the spookiest things I’ve seen is one dual funnel tornado…Native Americans call it a ‘man walking’…and it does look like that, like something monstrous and supernatural, striding across the landscape.
Up here in Spokane, we have them, but most are F1’s, a danger to fences and old sheds, but no more.
Volcanoes, supervolcanoes, earthquakes…those we have.
I was a kid when the 1964 tornado hit Wichita Falls, TX. In a school bus headed to Shepherd AFB. School was let out early so that we could get safely home. Ha! Well, while we were headed for the base, the tornado, which had wrecked the base, passed us headed for Wichita Falls. It seemed awfully close and our driver was speeding to get by it before it could turn, but it didn’t turn and went on to hit the town. We were at the windows watching it as it passed. That’s as close as I ever want to get to a tornado!
CHecks from a restaurant in that Wichita Falls tornado, which was the same year as the one that grazed my house, landed in OKC.
in ’08 or ’09 a storm that included ‘straight force winds’ came through my apartment complex. I woke up with the freight train roaring and just as I got to the bathroom door the (large) elm just outside my 2nd floor (and about 20 feet from where my head had been resting) broke and the whole canopy went down in the greensward between the buildings. I will NEVER forget that sound. NEVER.
My heart goes out to anyone who, for whatever reason, finds themselves living with such conditions being an ‘everyday hazard’.
I have no recent experience (thanking all the fortuitous gods!) with tornadoes, although I had a few brushes with them when I used to live in OH. I lived for several years in Xenia, which had an entire subdivision flattened in 1974. A decade later, you could still find concrete stairs leading to vacant lots, some with snarled metal railings still attached.
I’ve been thought several quakes in both LA and San Francisco, just missed Loma Prieta by an hour (on a plane at 4pm) and tornados scare the beejeezes out of me.
I can’t imagine going through one.
This batch hasn’t hit us up in Tulsa (187km, 116 miles NW of Oklahoma City). Lots of grumbling thunder, rain, storm watches, etc but they generally went north and south of us. As usual, they followed Interstate 44 pretty closely on the way up to Joplin which was devastated last year.
My favorite description of the sound a tornado makes is in I SHOULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING WHEN THE RABBIT DIED by Theresa Bloomingdale. Their house was in the direct path of a 1975 tornado in Nebraska. If I remember right she used words like demons screaming, along with the train sound. I’m hoping the survivors of Monday’s tornadoes can have the optimism of her husband. It doesn’t matter where we live, we’ll be together and it will be home.
A delightful book. Check your local library.
“I felt so helpless!” Well, errmm, yeah! Nobody stands up to an EF5! One EF5 can ruin your whole day.
Mebbe modern Americans have gotten a bit of exaggerated opinion of their own importance?
I’m not sure what that comment is too, but I think everyone has an exaggerated opinion of his own importance. It is human nature and has nothing to do with where we happen to be born.
I tell you, I remember one takeoff from Will Rogers in OKC, and of course you have to take off and land into the wind to keep air under your wings…but in this case, I’d been eyeing that greenish black cloud for an hour thinking, I hope we get out of here before that arrives; and then in the way of bad storms, it picked up speed…right about the time we were boarding.
We took off headed for that damn green cloud and I, with a window seat that showed me quite enough, thank you, kept practically pulling on my right armrest, saying to myself, Come on, man, stand this thing on its wing, to heck with the tower…get us out of here!
We turned; we flew on, on a flight so bumpy there was no drink service and two stews grabbed each other in the aisle screaming What’s he doing up there?!!!
Learned a tornado had hit Will Rogers Airport just 5 minutes after our takeoff.
We landed in KC, and all that night, after I went to bed, I kept waking, feeling the bed going up and down, up and down…
Holy frijoles, Cousin Speedy! I hope that was a relatively brief flight. Hitting bad weather in an airplane is one of my scare points. The little planes that fly into the small airports in HI have pilots that are paid only a little more than minimum wage, and encouraged to take the most fuel efficient routes. Often this involves going through patches of turbulent air close to mountains and cliffs. Crashes are rare, but you still don’t enjoy being shaken AND stirred!
To borrow a current favorite phrase: That would have been too much for MY laundry!
I had a similar bouncy flight about 45 years ago in a twin radial engine Convair, as I recall. As we were taxiing out the pilot came on the intercom: “Those of you sitting on the right hand side of the plane can look north and see a clear blue sky. As we swing around, those of you on the left can look to the west and see the thunder clouds building. Ladies and gentlemen, we are going west.” It was a rather bumpy ride, but no tornadoes involved. Actually, I think we went north-west. It was a comparatively small plane, and just a short hop from Cleveland to Lansing, so we couldn’t go above it.
I flew in one of those twin-engine jobs from Miami to Melbourne, Fl. It was like, “Please remain in your seats until both rubber bands have fully unwound. . .”
It was about an hour, little less. That’s why the deck was still moving….
Oh, I’ve had some doozies of flights, back in the day. I haven’t flown but for emergencies since 9/11—I refuse to put up with that crap from TSA—but I have had some good ones.
I’ve had some real pant staining flights. Once in Mexico on a DC-6 I looked out the window, saw the airport below us, said to my seat mate, “We’ll have to drop like a rock to make the runway,” and we did. Th stews both screamed and ran for their seats.
Another time the pilot had to buzz the strip to chase the cows.
I always like Boeing planes for their sturdy construction. Douglas planes creek and groan on takeoff but not Boeing.
I still need my volcanic eruption to complete my set.
I love feeling an airplane leap into the sky. Sometimes you can just tell that the pilot is enjoying the flight!
My favorite OKC flight was back when things were a little less—constrained…and we’d come back to a thundery, totally socked in OKC in midafternoon. The pilot came on,saying given the violent weather we might have to be diverted to Tulsa…
Then the pilot screamed “THere’s a hole!” stood the commercial jet (I think it was a 737) on one wing and dived like a maniac through a gap in the clouds.
We made our landing.
Aren’t many commercial pilots ex-military jet jockeys? They have the experience, but sometimes they fly like they’re still flinging around their fighters in combat.
I flew home to LAX once with an ex-naval carrier pilot. I knew because he flew that plane right onto the runway. Carrier pilots have to be prepared for a “bolter”. When they hit the deck, they go full take-off power in case the hook skips over the cables. This guy didn’t go to full power, but he did have power all the way down. (Most get a couple feet above, cut power and let ‘er drop.)
I once sat on the runway apron at Executive in Sacramento for an hour waiting for takeoff in the fog. It wasn’t that we couldn’t take off, but that if anything happened we wouldn’t have been able to land immediately.
I think that pilot had more fun on that landing than he’d had in months…
Then there was the one, crossing the Continental Divide toward Denver—rocky terrain, cloud-veiled, partly; and a helluva buffeting as we sank and rose, sank and rose….
Then, at the last before we cleared the Divide, the pilot came on and said, I quote, “Sorry, folks, the damned FAA won’t give us any more altitude. Hang on.”
We dropped, shot forward and down, ‘shot’ the stream between two peaks, went over the last pass like a raft on a waterfall, and you could both feel it and hear the plane creak and the engines work hard as the pilot pulled up out of that chute.
I don’t think anybody aboard that plane reported the language, not to the FAA or the airline, at least.
I’ve flown into Denver. The turbulence was like going over a washboard and the wings were literally flapping. The white knuckler in the seat next to me commented on that fact, to which I replied, “Of course they’re flapping. That’s how we stay in the air.” To add another twist of the screw, so to speak, we had to abort that approach, circle the field and come in again because the trainee ATC in the tower goofed up. I had to sprint to make my connection and got to see the other side of that mountain going back out 30 minutes later. I flew from SF to Denver to Dallas (overflying my destination) to Lubbock. Of course, OK is close enough to Texas that you know if a Texan is going to hell, they have to go through Dallas.