Any body here been in or even seen tornados?

I have been very close to several. Fortunately they have been smaller tornados.
They are such awe inspiring phenomena, yet so frightening.
Brief list of my experiences:

- at age 4 a tornado swept through our city park during fireworks display on July 4th. Somehow, no one got killed. Blocks away My uncle had a brand new Chevy with a huge oak sitting on it.

- Coming home from a retirement party, I spied a tornado in my mirror as I drove down the highway. Fortunately the tornado went north as I went east. I saw it hit a farmhouse in my mirror.

- Twice in college while working at a gas station I saw tornadoes go overhead. Once the police came out to tell me that there would be a tornado go overhead in about 90 seconds. We haul stuff into the building and then stood at the door as the tornado went right overhead.

- About a year after we moved into our current home our small town was unofficially hit by a tornado on Mother's Day. I had just built a huge picnic table, ver heavy. i watched it get smashed to bits against a tree. Watched from the door to the basement.

- Leaving work one day, I was halfway across the parking lot when it got so black and the siren sounded. I quickly went back to my very small office which was a designated safe room. So we had @ 20 people up close and personal in a room too small for one person.
Funny story about that. A new management person decided to call his insurance man to check on his insurance coverage while the storm raged. The insurance man answered the phone. When the new guy asked about his coverage, you could hear the insurance guy ream his ass out loud and clear.

- Finally, my brother went through a tornado in the basement of a church in 2006. The storm hit in the middle of mass and fortunately every one got safely to the basement.


This is in no way meant to equate myself in any way to what has happened this year. Just kind of reflecting on how lucky we have been.

Blew through downtown as I was passing through.
On my way back from a sales call with a sales rep in her new Lexus.
We sat under a overpass as it roared across the highway about 200 yards in front of us.
As soon as it passed, she threw it in gear and was going to take off, until I yelled "NO! NOT YET!"
Just then a freaking dumpster, and a ton of other debris CRASHED on the highway were we would have been driving.
They closed downtown because glass from the skyscrapers was falling onto the streets below.

I lived in Kansas City for 13 years where tornadoes were always a threat, and I survived.
Nashville in 1998 was were I could have bought the farm.

I was working out near the airport at the time, and our office had the tornado siren go off, so we all went downstairs. Since it wasn't raining there, many of us went outside and watched the tornado roar through downtown.

One went through a local cemetary and uprooted a bunch of very old and HUGE trees. My dad got a slice of one of their branches and you would think it came from the TRUNK of a large tree, that's how large the branches were. The Tornado just lifted those trees right out of the ground. Luckily they were all in a cemetary, so there were no LIVING people nearby.

And have lived here most of my life. It's hard not to wind up getting close to one here. Some days I have clear memories of are:

June 8 1974, Tornado outbreak.

Had 3 of them come close to our farm house that day. The first one we saw was tracking pretty much due east along the railroad tracks that ran about 1/2 mile south of our house, good clear view of it across an open field. The second one set down about 1/2 mile southwest of the house and was coming straight at us, we all scrambled into the cellar, fortunately that one lifted up before it got to us and went over the top of the house. The 3rd one came a while later and was hanging down at treetop level tracking ENE. It grabbed the top of a big beautiful elm tree we had in our front yard and twisted it up until it looked like an old fashioned ice cream cone, broke out an upstairs window and then proceeded to tear up the north end of the little town of Davenport OK 2 miles to the east where I went to school. I'm 47 now, I was 10 then but I remember it like it was yesterday.

April 24,1993.

The East Tulsa/Catoosa F4 tornado. I was playing a gig at the Tulsa Moose Lodge that evening and was loading my gear into the ballroom. It was tracking pretty much east-west at that point and was not quite on the ground, it was tearing the tops out of the taller trees at that point. It was a big scary looking mess, a huge, ragged rotating wall cloud, to the untrained eye it might not have looked like a tornado at that point but I knew exactly what it was. It passed about 100 yards north of where I was standing, the barometric pressure dropped like a rock, hurt my ears it dropped so fast. It set down a mile or two to the east and tore the hell out of Catoosa.

May 3 1999. Tornado outbreak.

That was the day the strongest F5 ever recorded tore through Moore, OK. There were tornadoes everywhere that day. I had gone from Tulsa to Edmond early that day to deliver a couple guitar amps I had sold and on my way back, topped a hill west of Stroud OK on the Turner Turnpike and stood on the brakes, there was a big assed Tornado crossing the road. I sat and watched it tear up the outlet mall they had there at Stroud on the north side of the Turnpike. It was spooky as hell... :scared:

just down the road from Davenport
Didn't Drumright get hit at the same time in 1974?
I had folks there, but I was long gone and living in Florida (via Texas) in the 70's

this year. It jumped my house. Got pitch black and sounded like a low flying jet or a freight train.

I live in Georgia now and several have hit neighborhoods several blocks from me. And when I lived in Florida, one came really close, so close that I could hear the freight train roar. I have been in many hurricanes in Florida, but I think I would rather be in the middle of a hurricane than a tornado. At least, there is advance warning so you can duck and cover. In fact, the one that hit Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in April traveled up here to Cartersville, GA, which is just a few miles from my town. The tornado sirens were blasting and I thought it was going to hit here, but fortunately, it skipped over Woodstock where I live and hit up the road.

off in the distance, but very clearly a tornado. I never heard about it hitting any structures or anything, so I assume it didn't.

house in Morton (leveled an apartment building).
And then about 2 block from their home in Washington.

I was driving home from my ex-boyfriend's house. He had suggested I just stay the night but I think he was annoying me and I wanted to go home. As I was driving home a small Tornado popped down on Rt 611. I was able to get my car pulled over and ran into a gas station -from there I saw it pass by.

The news next day confirmed it was a tornado that had hit there.

.

You don't think of tornadoes in our neck of the woods. I'm trying to picture one coming down 611.

The one that touched down in our yard put a tree into my kitchen, and then continued on, finally destroying about 1/3 of the Morris Arboretum. I was down the shore that weekend (it was a Sunday) and missed it by a few minutes. I drove up my driveway, thinking "why does my apartment look wrong?" Oh, because the tree next to it had split in two and there were pine branches in my kitchen.

One of my friends had her garage ruined by a tornado that touched down on the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, and then came into her neighborhood, wrecking a few garages and cars before disappearing. Seriously - a tornado in Center City Philadelphia.

it was late so I had no clue what was happening but it was freaky. Crap was flying everywhere. At that point I figured the best bet was to get off the road and into a building.

Used to live in Plymouth Meeting and work in Doylestown. Can't even imagine encountering a tornado here....

I was a waitress at the Houlihans right there by the mall. I know, it was a chain restaurant but if you worked an average of 30 hours a week you were able to get some health insurance. Wasn't the best insurance but it was coverage.

But seriously, I've been there so often - I worked in Plymouth Meeting for years and we used it for business lunches, met people there after work, took a little girl we used to take care of out for dinner there many times, and have just met up with friends there. It's a great central spot if you have people coming in from all over. I feel I've spent half my life sitting in that reception area waiting for one person or another!

I still attend the Quaker meeting right down the street (from which the town gets its name).

Small world. Found out a few years back that SalmonChantedEvening (of the Sunday LOL Cats) and I went to the same high school, and live in the same town now.

He was about 8-9 years younger than me so I barely remembered him but we knew people in common.

it was late so I had no clue what was happening but it was freaky. Crap was flying everywhere. At that point I figured the best bet was to get off the road and into a building.

working at a Walgreens when this guy came running in telling everyone to get away from the windows, a tornado was above the store ( literally, at this point ABOVE the store ) I got far away enough to look outside the front doors and it was totally black...you couldn't see shit, but you heard a constant roar of wind...I was wondering if my car would still be out there when I was done my shift.

Turns out that the guy was a tornado chaser and ran in to the management office to call the station to give his location. My car was still there....apparently there were two tornadoes traveling across Lee County that struck the area of Cape Coral, Ft.Myers and Marco Island.....no casualities that I knew of...


I'll take snowstorms any day, thank you very much

One touched down about a mile from my house Sunday night. It took the same path as another storm that hit that road a little over 31 years ago. Back then, a house was heavily damaged. This time, a farm was damaged, including some of the buildings.

About 12 years ago, we saw one in the cornfield to the southwest of us. It did not touch down.

I live in Illinois.

I've lived off and on in the Midwest for about 25 years, also in Wyoming, which gets tornadoes. I do believe I saw one when driving on I80 west of Des Moines once, but the rain and hail and all kinda obscured it. And then driving north out of Kansas City once, the sky was black-green and the radio was blaring warnings, I stopped and waited under an overpass till things died down. I was looking for tornadoes but it was getting dark and I was scared to look too hard. Those are the ones that I think are really scary, the ones that come in the night when you can't see em and might not even be awake to hear the warnings or sirens. I'm now back in Iowa and just a-waitin for em.

When I was a kid, one went right next to our house. It cracked the garage floor, and tossed my swingset about 1/2 mile into a field. Aside from stripping off a bunch of roof tiles, that was the extent of the damage.

The other one was when I was in grad school in downstate Illinois. I was on the road with some friends, and we ditched the car and hid under an overpass as it blew by us.

But, yeah, living most of my life in the Midwest, I've seen quite a few at a more comfortable distance.

...peered outside and there was an electrical transformer just whipping in the air........of course, I quickly closed the door and waited until it was all over with. NOTHING in comparison to what has happened in Joplin or in the south here recently.

Not sure if these type of things are getting more and more aggressive and wide-spread or not....kind of seems that way to me...

I grew up in Miami in the 60's and 70's. Went thru a few hurricanes back then...but it was nothing compared to Andrew in which many members of my family went thru that absolute devastation back then...

Tomorrow is promised to NO ONE and life can indeed change instantly on a dime! I guess the thing that kind of brings me a bit of solace....is - say what you/"they" will about Americans being a all-consuming, shallow lot.....in times when the bullet hits the bone....folks here (according to the Weather Channel) are bombarded with requests from we Americans who want to know how we can help!

nearly 40 years back, before we were married, we had stopped by a friend's place just to chat.
It was as hot as it can get - nearly 100 with very high humidity. We were in our car - one of those things where you just stopped because they were out.

Hot, humid, darkening skies, still as can be - just miserable. And the BANG! a transformer blew right over our heads. we hit the floor of the car and our friends hit the ground. We thought we were shot or something.

I've never seen anything like it.

Was returning my rental car when all hell broke loose. The woman driver from Avis yelled at me: "just leave the car right there and get on this bus! Now!!!" She then drove us to the shelter of the garage.

Found out later that a tornado had touched down a few miles away.

I wrote a letter to Avis mentioning her name and saying "it's nice when your employees are polite, but it's even better when they go out of their way to potentially save your life"

I had moved from the small town of Winnsboro in SC in 1983 and the next summer they had a tornado that killed 6 people, and then the system set down another two further on and killed about 20 people in all. Every one in my old town said the same thing, that the sky had turned the oddest shade of green just before the tornado hit. They said they had never seen that phenomena before or since. Wonder what causes it?

By the way, the storm hit about 5:30 and destroyed a gym at a high school. They had an event scheduled there that night, and if the storm had hit an hour and a half later, there would have been about 200 people in that building.

The sky turned green. We were told to get in a ditch. It didn't hit us, but it passed close by.

while driving from Cheyenne, WY to Fort Laramie, I saw a large white funnel cloud slowly descend from the sky onto the Interstate and lie there down the length of the highway like a lazy, giant slug. Part of the funnel cloud was still in the sky, but most of it was lying on the highway. The outer portion of the funnel was still, but the inside appeared to be churning. Vehicles heading to Cheyenne were able to drive around it on the shoulder, and those of us heading in the other direction took the Chugwater exit, avoiding it altogether. As I approached Chugwater, an alert went out over local radio stations warning of an approaching tornado – which, as I later learned, did a lot of damage at the Cheyenne Frontier Days fairgrounds. I didn’t hear of any injuries to animals or people. It may have been the sluglike tornado I’d seen. I don’t know.

I was a teenager. My mother and I were driving home to Arizona from a vacation to the Midwest. It was mid-afternoon, and we were heading south from Wyoming to Denver, CO. Just after we crossed the Colorado border, we started to run into bad weather. The sky turned green, just like people always say. We were listening to a radio station out of downtown Denver, and we could hear sirens going off in the background as the announcer started talking about how they were having to go down to the basement, and then they went off the air.

At that point, we started seeing a funnel cloud drop out of the sky in front of us. I looked in the rearview mirror, and there was one behind us as well. We were on this highway with no shelter at all - flat as a pancake, nothing but fields in all directions, and it was a LONG way between overpasses.

I was absolutely terrified. I was so frightened my hands went numb and I couldn't curl my fingers. I don't know how scared my mother must have been, but she just kept driving. There wasn't much else to do. We didn't know about the "get in a ditch" thing at that time.

Luckily, the funnel cloud in front of us eventually decided not to become a full-fledged tornado on the ground and we eventually made it to Denver, where the city was in a total panic and mess. Don't know what happened to the funnel cloud I saw behind us. I know several tornadoes touched down that day across the front range, including an F3 in metro Denver that did quite a bit of damage and killed some people.

It turned out to be the worst tornado outbreak in the history of Denver (maybe Colorado in general): http://books.google.com/books?id=o9A7vGCxeFYC&pg=PA356&lpg=PA356&dq=denver+june+15+1988&source=bl&ots=xgHRaDItgN&sig=Bqm6Wxo5GF_fqJ6BeKanZnc2Fuo&hl=en&ei=lejcTcyPA8ycgQeO__0X&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CGkQ6AEwAzgU#v=onepage&q=denver%20june%2015%201988&f=false

Can't remember the chemical plant I was working at (summer job) but my workmate and I were out in "the yard" (an open storage area for pallets of mostly equipment like pipe valves and instrument packages) clearing, cleaning and generally trying to better organize it all.

The weather was typical hot and humid summers back in the early 1980s, where the thunderstorms are seen on the horizon when you get up and are fully formed into the afternoon storms by 3pm (it was like clockwork back then.) This time, however, we were way in the back of the yard, too far away from shelter of any kind and no ditches to speak of. We watched as the funnel formed overhead and then dipped down into a vortex maybe a hundred or two hundred yards away (I'm lousy at guessing distances I can't see up close.)

We were rather scared to say the least, as not only were we right out in the open, but so were all these pallets of equipment weighing hundreds of pounds for some of them. The kind of thing that would crush you and not slow down if caught in a vortex. But, luckily for us, this one probably wouldn't have been able to lift much. We did watch it shred what looked like a disused guard shack in the next property over, but it was pretty flimsy just by the looks of it (stick frame with corrugated sheet metal walls and roof.)

So, this thin, snaking vortex took out a building the neighboring company likely didn't care about and then dissipated. (Maybe it was slated for demolition ;)) We were just happy it didn't go anywhere beyond that!

last year, May 10, 2010, on a storm that hit Norman, OK.
Yesterday, two tornadoes swerved around Norman, one about4 miles north, the other about 5 miles south. That is as close as I've ever been and it was WAY too close for my comfort.

Have seen several but have not been in one. I have experienced straight line winds near 100 mph but technically not a tornado.

Last night I thought that might have changed but luck still held. Some of the big ugly ones were forming up 20 miles away but everything went north and south of the city. We spent the time navigating our daughter from a far south side mall back to her house during a large gap in the activity.

Before Oklahoma I lived in Ohio where I first saw tornadoes dancing on the far horizon.

Once when I was about seven or eight, there was a small tornado that took out a few buildings a few miles from our home. This was in Virginia Beach, VA.

Then twice in 2009 when I was living in Bethany Beach, DE, there were tornadoes within a mile of my house. I was at home both times, and had no idea about them until after they were already gone. Scary! One was just off the shore in the ocean. I saw pictures of it, and it was truly amazing. The other was in the parking lot of a grocery store. My stepmother was actually in that parking lot at the time, sitting in her car. She said it was very small, but extremely frightening.

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=&imgrefurl=http://photo.accuweather.com/photogallery/details/photo/49172/Water%2BSpout&usg=__PS9InsWUhKUtz6G1RKtx3DYK7JE=&h=500&w=375&sz=25&hl=en&start=0&sig2=dO649FIy3MjU73QaLMqEeg&zoom=1&tbnid=mtvYGv9W9j9KqM:&tbnh=132&tbnw=114&ei=KyzdTYiKAYLPgAeZp4j1Dw&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dbethany%2Bbeach%2Btornado%26hl%3Den%26biw%3D1280%26bih%3D675%26gbv%3D2%26tbm%3Disch&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=128&vpy=52&dur=3375&hovh=259&hovw=194&tx=117&ty=127&sqi=2&page=1&ndsp=28&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0

Huh, guess it was actually 2008. My mind... it goes. Just on the other side of those taller buildings is the ocean. It never hit land, so I guess it was officially a water spout, but still...

Oh! I forgot about the one that hit Severna Park, MD in I want to say 2006? I was living in Annapolis at the time, which is about 10ish miles away. That one actually hit my brother-in-law's sister's house. No one was hurt, but it tore off a big section of the roof.

None of these were a very big deal, even the bigger water spout, but they all happened in places where tornadoes are supposed to be rare. Pretty scary stuff.

I've lived in "Tornado Alley" all my life. There is no mistaking the sight or sound of a tornado.

in Chicago, Illinois. I was walking across the quad of the University of Chicago to my dorm from my last class before going home for summer break. It was cloudy and windy, but I was in too good a mood to notice much until I saw my meteorology prof outside with a class and heard him say - "oh look, there's the funnel cloud now." I looked up and passing right overhead and heading for the lake was a dark, seething, twisting cloud mass. It was interesting in a really scary way.

A few years later, in April, 1989 a friend's mom and I drove down from our town in New Jersey to visit her daughter and brand-new grandbaby in Virginia Beach. We stopped in Annapolis to visit with cousins of mine and to see how my mom's and my new house was doing (we moved a few months later). As we drove into the Williamsburgh area it was dark and rainy. I needed gas and while I filled up a woman at the pump advised me that tornados had been spotted and water spouts were reported on the James, just a few miles ahead. We pushed on with the radio on and just as we were crossing the James, the radio reported a water spout. I didn't see it but Mrs. Elwell did. We got to my friend's house in Virginia Beach safely, however a day or so later a tornado went right through her front yard. Her mom, a Minnesota native, heard the distinctive railroad rumble, grabbed the baby and sheltered in a small windowless bathroom on the first floor. I had an appointment with an astrologer that day and my friend had come out to pick me up. It took her a few minutes to get there and as I waited, I was treated to a fascinating sight - US Navy planes lining up over NAS Oceania to land as quickly as possible. I stepped out from under the shopping center walkway were I was waiting and watched in fascination as a large dark cloud just took over the whole sky. We never saw the twister that hit her neighborhood, but I can tell you it was a bear getting back to her house. Fortunately all was safe there except for some tops of tall pine trees that were now sitting on her front lawn.