Ringside seat at Tornado Alley
Yours truly, a few days after the F5 tornado in Oklahoma City, May 1999:
You can’t watch destruction at this level, even at a “safe” distance, without something happening to you. The deeply religious, and we have lots of them, saw this as a severe test of their faith; the vast majority of them, I believe, held on. For those of an environmentalist bent — and perhaps also for those who scoff at such things — the storm was a none-too-gentle reminder that Nature always gets the last word.
Today’s line of storms contained entirely too many tornadoes. We didn’t get the Joplin treatment, but there exist reports of casualties and lots of fuzzy video. Apparently one tornado tracked to my north and one to my south; all I got was a lot of rain — I estimate about ¾ to one inch in an hour — a few broken limbs, and a dinner delayed by an hour and a quarter. I suppose I’ll know tomorrow if it took out the office.
McGehee »
24 May 2011 · 6:35 pm
Glad you’re safe.
CGHill »
24 May 2011 · 6:44 pm
Warnings started coming out two, three hours in advance. (It helps to have the Severe Storms Lab just down the road.) I figured, if I didn’t get killed by panicky drivers on the way home, the rest would be easy.
Teresa »
24 May 2011 · 6:54 pm
Mother nature always makes you think when she decides to get the bit between her teeth. So glad she left you alone. Seems to be a bumper crop of storms this year.
LeeAnn »
24 May 2011 · 7:05 pm
H and I had the “what to grab first” discussion. Of course Monkey was first, but then it was a long talk about how to get both computers in the car. We finally agreed…. I’ll stay here and wait it out. :)
Dan B »
24 May 2011 · 9:05 pm
The Severe Storms Lab had themselves to take shelter from the severe storms. El Reno’s Mesonet site registered a 151 mph gust. (Graphic here)
Ringside seat? Ugh. I would ask for the cheap seats, but those require dealing with blizzards, earthquakes, hurricanes, Yankees, or some combination thereof.
Tatyana »
24 May 2011 · 9:07 pm
Thank you for this post; I was just watching news and ran from TV to find out if you’re OK. Supposedly “few broken limbs” are not your own!
CGHill »
24 May 2011 · 9:25 pm
I have a dozen trees on a quarter-acre; not all of them take kindly to 70-mph wind gusts.
The panicmeisters at one local TV station said they were seeing wind shear out there in the 200-mph range. (Some of their footage of storm chasers around Piedmont showed up on the site of a Florida radio station, mislabeled as downtown Oklahoma City; it is a measure, I think, of how little people know about this town that no one questioned the fact that there were almost no buildings along that stretch of section-line road. Even the Instant Man picked it up, though he added a correction later.)
Dick Stanley »
24 May 2011 · 9:58 pm
The meteors say the Alley’s long and it extends down here in Austin where, so far, we haven’t seen any at all. Hope it stays that way.
CGHill »
24 May 2011 · 10:10 pm
National radar, for the moment, isn’t showing much activity south of DFW.
hatless in hattiesburg »
25 May 2011 · 1:08 am
The infamous “tornadic hook echo” on radar passed directly over my house in north Fort Worth a little before 8pm. No tornado or hail, just weird start-stop-start rain and winds, and a great photo/video opportunity of several layers of clouds going in every direction simultaneously…
Jeffro »
25 May 2011 · 1:10 am
I was over by Tulsa when all the tornado activity got hot and heavy. I went west to I35 then north out of OK before heading west again – there was a tornado on the ground west of Enid, so continuing west on 412 was right out, as far as I was concerned.
One of your tv station’s weather coverage was simulcast on several radio stations, which is how I kept up. The one that crossed I40 over by Calumet was quite the doozy.
As I got closer to home, there was a tornado around Great Bend, and even one south of Kalvesta – which is pretty much my front porch.
The season has just started, and I’ve had enough already.
CGHill »
25 May 2011 · 6:54 am
As for the office, it’s waterlogged — again — but otherwise undamaged.
nightfly »
25 May 2011 · 9:16 am
Just stay safe, CG.
McGehee »
25 May 2011 · 9:29 am
How close is your house to the radar site? The farther away it is the higher above the ground the echoes are.
Tornadoes can be very un-vertical.
hatless in hattiesburg »
25 May 2011 · 10:31 am
“How close is your house to the radar site? The farther away it is the higher above the ground the echoes are. Tornadoes can be very un-vertical.”
i’d guess that radar site is a little over 20 miles south of here.
the tornado(es?) that came from that specific hook earlier started about 20 miles west and 3 miles north of here, and tore up some stuff for maybe 12 miles almost due east from that generally this area ~tinyurl.com/3l38e23
Jeff Brokaw »
25 May 2011 · 2:19 pm
Wow – glad to hear nothing bad happened to you or your property, Chaz. You’ve been through the ringer with storms lately, it seems . . . but then maybe that is just life in OKC.
BTW, looks like we might not have to worry about a Bulls-Thunder NBA Final. Sad face. :( But hey, it’s never over until it’s over, just like Yogi Berra said. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Heck no!
CGHill »
25 May 2011 · 2:22 pm
Life is like that out here. We get to buy our houses for half what they cost in most other NBA cities, and then we get to pay twice as much to insure them.
Nicole »
25 May 2011 · 7:44 pm
Glad to hear you made it through. We all shoved into the stairwells at work today as one touched down 5 blocks south, skipped us and touched down again a bit north of us.
Mel »
25 May 2011 · 8:49 pm
I think I was streaming said panicmeister over here in NE Oklahoma. When I heard it it was 220 mph shear, although that was 140 in one direction right next to 80 in the opposite direction. I suspected the larger number was for oomph.
Then again, as a techie, I might say out loud “Wow, it’s got a terabyte of RAM!!” as a gut reaction. The tornado in question was quite violent at that point.
And God love David Payne … if they could get a tornado to stay put in the infield, he could win the Indy 500 driving the pace car!