A Scary Way to Wake Up
- March 09, 2006
- 4 comments
Late last night some really bad thunderstorms rolled in. I stayed up late watching TV and listening to the weather radio go off every five minutes with a new alert. Around 2:30 am, we lost the satellite, so I decided to head to bed and try to get some sleep. The wind was really whipping, but it didn’t sound like it was doing any damage. Thankfully the weather radio stopped going off all the time, and I eventually fell to sleep after 4 am.
Around 7:30 this morning, the weather radio went off again and half woke me up. I could hear the wind and rain still, but it sounded like it did earlier in the night. I was just about to go to sleep again when I heard it. The classic sound a tornado makes when it’s getting close. It sounded at first like distant thunder, but it kept getting louder. If you’ve ever been right by train tracks when a train is going by slowly, you’ll have an idea of what it sounded like. The really deep rumble of the locomotive engines will shake the ground when they go by. It was something like that, but much more scary. I love the sound of a locomotive, but this sound scared the bejeebees out of me. I could hear the rain really starting to pelt the house and started hearing larger objects getting blown around outside. I was immediately wide awake and throwing on my clothes.
While I was putting on my shirt, it went right over us. It wasn’t touching the ground yet, thankfully, but it was still making a lot of noise. It sounded like a train was going right by our house. The windows on one side of the house rattled and then again on the other side of the house. Our French doors blew open and rain started pouring into the living room. The trees outside were getting whipped around first in one direction, then another and we lost power. It took around 30 seconds for it to go by in my estimation.
Something eventually did touch down less than a mile from us. It was at least a feeder band and maybe an F1, but it tore through some chicken houses and someone’s well house. Insulation, wood and sheet tin are strewn all over the place for a good mile. Other than that, there wasn’t much damage in this area. We only got power back up about an hour ago.
I hope that’s the only time I’ll ever use a tornado as an alarm clock. It’s effective for sure, but scary as hell.
The local paper has a story on some of the damage done in the area.
Russ
March 9, 2006
Reading your story Chris, the only visual that came to mind, was from the beginning of “The Wizard of Oz”, when everyone was running around the farm and scrambling for shelter as the twister got closer. Glad to hear everyone is OK.
Wasn’t Petra Nemcova the model that clung to a tree for dear life during the tsunami last year?
Lucky bastard. Look at the great story and experience you just had without even leaving the house. Some people get all the luck.