HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A TORNADO?
I have seen five on four occasions.
First time it was in 1974 during the night of the Super Outbreak. While driving that evening with my mom, we witnessed the silhouette of the F4 tornado that skipped through north of Cincinnati. It passed in front of us across the road about a mile off in the distance. We only saw it during lightning strikes. I was terrified. I was only 11; and it happened just a couple of hours after one of the strongest tornadoes of all time (a massive F5) had literally wiped the town of Xenia, Ohio off of the map. The radio blared report after report of tornadoes, all over the entire area. I recall the weatherman saying, "If you can hear my voice, I beg all of you to seek shelter immediately; and may God be with you all tonight. " We drove home and my family stayed huddled in the basement while it stormed worse than I've ever seen it storm, all night long. I thought we were going to die. It caused a serious phobia for the next few years for me of severe weather. That later in turn caused a morbid fascination of storms for me, and to this day, I absolutely love severe weather. The worse the better for me.
Second time I was traveling to Chicago and while driving in Indiana a storm came up out of nowhere, and a tornado crossed the highway ahead of everybody. You could see it off in the distance for quite a ways, and everyone stopped and watched it pass. Turned out to be an F2.
Third time I was driving my father in laws dog from NM to DC about 12 years ago. I was in the panhandle of Texas; and during the afternoon, on a bright sunny day, a storm came up, and it got pitch black dark as far as you could see. It was literally as if the sun had gone out. I have never seen it that dark during the daytime. I was following a line of 3 other cars close to me on the highway. The wind was howling, it was blowing sheets of rain, and then started hailing golf ball sized hail. We were all driving about ten miles an hour, bumper to bumper. You could see massive roiling white clouds that were spinning sideways under the heavy blackness of the sky. Suddenly, it was as if the roiling mass threw a spinning cloud at us, and it flew down and buffeted our cars very hard. Everyone just stopped for about 30 seconds. We were in the middle of nowhere with fields all around us. We slowly drove on into a small town, and made our way to a gas station that was packed full of cars, but no people were to be found. Cars were still running. Doors were open. It was like the people had vanished. About two minutes later, they all emerged from a storm shelter at the rear of the gas station. It was very eerie and weird. The storm passed us and I gassed up, got a soda, and went to the bathroom to freshen up and chill out. I splashed some water on my face and set out now following the storm. I caught up to the clouds again very quickly, and it began to rain again, and I looked out of the right side of the car, and saw a huge tornado about a mile off of the highway following in the same direction. I came up on a car that was stopped in front of me, and they were looking to the left, and when I looked over, there was another tornado on the ground about another mile or two opposite the one on my right. I sped up,and got the hell out of there. It was a very strange experience. Later learned they were both F3's.
The last time was at my home in Ohio. A few days before Easter in 2009, we left our home in DC and came to our house in Ohio for the spring/ summer. The day we arrived some severe storms rolled through. I kept hearing something hit the huge bay window on the front of our house. I went to the front door, and it looked like smoke was swirling outside the window, and my front door was rattling in the frame. It was like the scene in Twister when the guy is holding onto the storm door. The bay window started to flex in and out, but didn't break. I froze, transfixed in my tracks. My wife rounded the corner to see what was happening, and her scream broke my paralysis. We ran to the basement just as the tornado sirens sounded outside. After the sirens stopped we emerged and went outside. The people across the road from me had the entire side of their house torn away. My neighbor next door lost his dormers and most of his roof. Several homes in my area were severely damaged. There was insulation and debris all over the yard. There were about a dozen shingles deeply embedded into my front yard, like thrown knives. I have a massive iron gate out front and it was torn from its hinges and thrown into my pool. Another wooden gate along my fence was torn from it's hinges and tossed into my lake. I never found the umbrella on our patio. My son the next day found a piece of tar shingle deeply driven into one of my fence posts. Turns out that what I was hearing splattering against the windows was insulation from the house across the street. The front, right side, and rear of my house were covered in my neighbors splattered insulation. The weirdest thing of all is that my neighbor across the street who had so much damage done, had decorated a tree in their yard with little Easter egg ornaments. None of the eggs was disturbed or missing. WTF?? The weather service came out and examined our hood. They estimated it was probably an F2.
How about you? Any tornado survivors or witnesses here?
Topic: HAVE YOU EVER? Seen a Tornado? (Read 3315 times)
