Tornado heading my way. Have you ever been in / seen a tornado?

Question

What's your story?

This will be #3 for me, if it comes to fruition.

I'm not sure if any tornadoes touched down in my area, but a lot of trees down. BTW: I wasn't running because there was nowhere to run to. If you live in tornado alley, you know you're not supposed to run, but stay put (unless you live in a trailer, which I don't).

Sam1981: Haha!! That was hilarious.

Answer 1

Your face is a tornado!

Answer 2

I lived in the southwest suburbs of Chicago known as "tornado alley" about 20 years ago. We had a terrible storm come on very suddenly. I was home alone and went down to the crawl space under the house. When I came out there were 3 broken windows and lots of trees down on the block. The center of the tornado had passed about 1 mile from our house. We moved a year later and now live in Washington State where there are never any tornadoes.

Answer 3

Yep, I have been in three of them. I live in tornado alley and it's that time of year. They come through here all the time.

I saw the first one when I was 10 and visiting a farm in central Illinois. It looked just like the long "elephant trunk" in the Wizard of Oz. It touched down and came back up before it got to us.

The second I heard but did not see. It sounded like a freight train with a loud cracking noise. The noise was the top of the trees on my street snapping off.

The last one happened in the distance when I was caught in traffic on a freeway. There were two funnels about a mile apart and we watched in terror as they came toward our car. They shifted a few minutes later and went back out into the fields.

Get in the cellar, or the middle of the bottom floor of the house, away from the windows. Have a bottle of water, a flashlight, a radio and, if you can, a mattress to put over your head.

Answer 4

I live in Tornado alley too but I've never actually seen one. An F0 tore through my neighborhood once during the over-night hours but no one saw it or heard it. It didn't do too much damage, but a lot of people had to re-shingle their roofs. It happened years ago but I didn't find out about it until a couple of months ago when I was looking up my counties tornado record history.

Answer 5

Wichita Falls, April 10, 1979.

I was a Junior in High School and working as a guitar teacher at a local music store. I wasn't too concerned when the sirens went off because in that part of the country you have a tornado warning approximately every other day. Shortly after they sounded I got a call from my mom telling me to get my @$$ home now!

So... I hopped in my truck and headed for home. The streets were relatively abandoned due to the impending storm. I looked off to the west and saw what I then thought was a huge black angry looking rain cloud. This, it turned out was the actual tornado. It was actually an aggregate of 4 separate individual tornados that were over a mile wide and were not even recognizable as a (a group of) funnel cloud(s) because they were so huge.

Just as I got home large hail stones began to fall (softball sized). I ran into the house and into the basement. A few minutes later things got quite. We were fortunate in that the path of destruction missed us by a couple of blocks. I was extra fortunate in that the path of destruction spread from the music store that I started at to a couple of blocks from my home. In other words, directly where I drove across!!

The electricity was out in most of the city for a few days. I spent the first night as a volunteer in the emergency room of the local hospital (I was a medical explorer at the time). The nearest I can describe that was like being in a MASH unit.
Stretchers were literally piled up in the hallways, no power, and emergency procedures being performed by flashlight.

The next couple of days were spent using my good old 68' Dodge truck to help friends salvage what they could from the piles of rubble that used to be their homes.

My big takeaway from that experience was:

1) Humans are remarkably resilient and often face major crisis with a fairly pragmatic sense of humor

2) Communities have a collective instinct to rally together during a major crisis.

3) The first useful outside aid to reach the city was the American Red Cross. Those guys deserve every bit of support you can give them.

Answer 6

I was living in North Carolina in the late 80's. A freak tornado came through our town. I was pumping gas and was nearly blown away. The funnel touched down 1 1/2 miles from where the gas station was. It tore the roof off of the largest textile mill in town.

I've been in a tornado, earthquake in California, and a hurricane in North Carolina.

If this is your third one, you already know the safety precautions to take. Good Luck.

Answer 7

Like everyone else apparently who has lived in Kansas I've seen a number of the bad things. I was doing storm spotter duty as a police officer and I saw one was headed right for me. I was just getting ready to tell dispatch that I was going to have to leave my post when it veered N.E. away from me and did a number on the air force base.
The worst part was I was stopping traffic from going West into its path and one guy drove around when my back was turned and drove right into the path of it. For some reason God didn't want that fool to die so he didn't get carried away, but he probably should've.
Then we had to work 12 hour shifts and do looter prevention duty. The destructive power of a tornado is incredible.

Answer 8

Yep...we had a tornado warning. We went to the row of houses next to ours (because those houses don't have basements, and ours do) to try to get people to come over to our house and take shelter in our basement. As we were standing outside knocking on doors, we saw the tornado a few miles away....SCARIEST thing I've ever seen in my life. A lot of people died that day...this is a heavily populated area and tornados very rarely happen. To have seen one is insane....

Answer 9

Yep, lived in Edmonton when the tornado hit without any warning whatsoever 20 years ago. 27 people lost their lives and many were injured when it hit a trailer park. Tragic.

Answer 10

Yes.

In 1987 I chased tornadoes with an NCAR chase team.

They are beautiful. They are amazing. And its difficult for me to believe that anyone who has experienced one can deny the existence of God.

I also watched one come at me while working at a theme park in Central Florida. I was pretty certain I was going to die. It was coming right across the lake at me, when it suddenly veered about 60 degrees and went past me.

Answer 11

Yeah,I staying with relatives out in North Dakota and one of them went by. It didn't hit us - or any other town - but it was quite a sight. My most vivid impression was that it seemed for all the world like it was alive and also capable of cognition. It was like an angry and unpredictable person. Only huge. Try to imagine what the ancient Native Americans must have thought of them. Remember,they are unique to the U.S. They don't have them in Europe or anything.