Well, today Joe and I (me, the native Kansan) experienced our first tornado! I was driving home on my lunch break around 11:00 AM to have lunch with Joe and the music stopped mid-song and the robot recording guy told me to take cover for a tornado!! Kinda freaky! It was pretty dark out and it was raining hard, but nothing looked unusual especially since we have been having so much rain lately. Well, then the tornado sirens went off. If you don't know what those are they are basically a foghorn thing on a big high pole that rotates around on top and makes this loud semi high-piched warning sound. If it's facing you it's super loud. I have heard it a decent amount because they set it off on Wednesdays to make sure it works, but I don't hear it often foreal! When I was a little girl, I used to see the sky change to crazy colors every now and again... green, yellow or orange. This time I SAW a real tornado and there were no crazy colors! I burst through the front door to tell Joe what I heard on the radio, but he had the news on -- I'm sure it was on every channel! There had been a touch down about 20 minutes south of us and the wall cloud was quickly headed our way. It was already to where I work -- I had called to let them know what I had heard on the radio and my boss said that everyone was gathering in the bathrooms to take cover. Joe called me to our back door and there it was! We had a huge funnel cloud that appeared to be on the ground although we couldn't see since trees were in the way. Joe took a video of it (
here is the link to the video!)and I took a couple pictures! I started to line the bathtub with pillows (which after the fact Joe thought was hilarious) since we live in an apartment and have no basement, but the funnel moved away from us. *PHEW*! According to the weather people on TV, the tornado did touch down several places around us although the only damage done in the entire metro area that I know of was a few headstones were knocked down way south of us. Us Kansas Citians had a crazy little adventure this morning that was both amazing and terrifing, and I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say how grateful I am that all my loved ones are safe and to be safe myself. Oh, and don't be afraid to visit!! :-)
2 comments:
Scary!!! glad you are okay!
Thanks! Part of the metro that is northeast of us was not as lucky -- a few people were minorly hurt, but no one was killed thankfully. I heard that the reason why nothing got destroyed down here was because it was so wet with all the rain we've gotten lately that the tornadoes couldn't suck anything up. We are so, so lucky... which makes it even more heart breaking to see all the devastation down in Joplin (and other places, too!) which is not too far from us. It's really neat to see the different communities come together for the relief of these precious people.
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