Tornado stories

Living in tornado country I've heard tornado stories all my life. One of my earliest memories is a tornado that hit not far from my house when I was 3. My mom took my two sisters and I to the basement and my youngest sister, who was only 2 weeks old, was in an infant seat. My mom put the infant seat on top of the dryer and turned on the dryer. I can still remember sitting in that cold basement looking at my baby sister sleeping in her little seat on top of that dryer as it made its rattling noise.

A few months later, a family moved into our neighborhood. I became best friends with one of their daughters. They had moved after their house was damaged in the tornado. They had 6 kids. It was late afternoon when the tornado hit and their mom took the kids down the street to the neighbors where there was a basement. When they got to the neighbors, the mom realized she had forgotten about the baby, who was taking a nap. So the mom ran back to the house and grabbed the baby and made it into the neighbors' basement just as the tornado hit their neighborhood. After the storm, they went back to their house and it was intact, except one room on the back corner was missing, like it had been sliced off the house. That was the room where the baby had been sleeping. That baby grew up to be best friends with my sister, the baby who had gone through the tornado on top of the dryer.

44 people were killed in that neighborhood. This is an article about that tornado: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1957_Central_Plains_tornado_outbreak

And pictures:





I've never understood how anyone could live in this part of the country and not have a basement. There were dozens of people killed in this tornado who were running to a neighbors to take shelter in a basement. I don't understand why they even build houses here without basements.

When I was in college, a tornado hit in the town where I was in school. One of the neighborhoods was relatively new homes, with underground phone lines, which were a new thing back in the 70s. We drove through the neighborhood to look at the damage a few hours after the tornado and heard phones ringing. One house after another destroyed or partially gone and the phones still worked. It was so weird. We also saw lots of houses gone but the bathtub was still there. Some of them looked like they were hanging in midair. So ever since then, I tell people if you can't get to a basement, go to your bathtub.

A friend of mine grew up on a farm about 50 miles south of here. When she was a little girl, a tornado hit their farm. Just as they got into the storm shelter, her grandmother ran back to the house to get her purse. They had been to the cattle auction that day and she had a lot of cash in her purse and didn't want to lose it. She ended up being killed by the tornado.

Several years ago, a tornado hit a town a couple hundred miles south of here. Obliterated the entire town. A week or so later, my friend found a drivers license laying in her front yard. It belonged to one of the men who lived in that town and had lost his house in the storm. His license had been in his wallet which was on his dresser when the tornado hit. Somehow the license had been blown out of the wallet and landed 200 miles away in my friend's yard.

Tornadoes are amazing and very dangerous. Stay safe everyone.

A fair amount of people have storm shelters, but they are pricey.

Not here in tornado alley. No way.

on top of a concrete pad. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were slab houses, built in the early '50s. We used the next door neighbors' basement--we had a key to the back door for when they weren't there. Even as a kid I thought it was kinda dumb to have houses without basements in tornado country.

I don't get it. So many of the people killed in Ruskin were running to a neighbor's basement. :scared:

or there is the option of paying a crapload of money for excavating part of the ground under your garage for a storm shelter.

There just aren't that many homes with basements here, period. The ground is much more rocky than up in KC.

great-aunt or -uncle back in the day was living in Wisconsin in a small log cabin. A tornado came and they ran to the cellar. They heard it go over and feared the worst. When they came back up they were pleased to see everything was pretty much untouched except for some dishes on the floor. But then they found that the linoleum on the floor of the kitchen was rolled up against one wall. The tornado had lifted up the roof, lifted up the woodstove and table (which had been set for supper), rolled up the linoleum, and set everything back down. Some dishes had fallen off the table but not all. The story goes, they figured that was almost scarier than having had the house blow away.

Too creepy.

It may be what I know but I'll pass on those horrifying tornadoes.

Lots bigger and more damage. Plus they last longer. I'll take a tornado over a hurricane.

advance warning. Just saying.

What I like about my move to NM is no tornadoes, for the most part, although a couple of months after I moved here in 2008 a tornado or two touched down in the southern part of the state, as I recall. The weather gods were looking for me, I'm convinced, but couldn't do their tornado thing here in the mountains of Santa Fe. Separately, a hurricane (maybe Ike, can't recall for sure which one) made landfall in Texas and rain and winds from it made it to southwestern New Mexico, again too far away to find me.

I hate both of them

:)

I took swimming lessons in that neighborhood years later.

And folks gather every year on the anniversary. It was very horrific.

We live in Dixie Alley, so we've thought of getting a shelter, especially after some of the seasons we've had lately. It seems it's been getting worse.

It took years to recover from this.

http://cjonline.com/indepth/66tornado/

I haven't recovered completely yet.

http://www.crh.noaa.gov/top/events/66tornado.php

Do you remember Rick Douglass, he was a radio personality back then. He was on the Mound and tried to outrun it in his car. It caught up with him at the I470 and Gage overpass. He got out of his car tried to get under the overpass. It picked him up and carried him a block away, IIRC. He had mud and gravel impacted in his skin. He survived. I have always remembered that, for some reason.

He said he was finding gravel in his skin for years.

On the other hand, it certainly launched a great career for Bill Curtis.

It is a mark we will both probably carry forever. I know people get sick of hearing about it when these kinds of threads or conversations start but it was one HUGE part of our growing up. I bet you think about it every time you look at the Capitol building and see those copper tiles that still look different. I know I do. Or the water tower that still stands. It is a part of our lives forever I suppose.

When I was a small child, back in the sixties, had one rip through my home town. It leveled the IGA that was across the creek, jumped the creek, tore through our backyard, took the carport off of our house clean as a knife cut, while we were inside. The neighbor's house, just a matter of feet away, suffered hardly a shingle disturbed.

During the seventies my family went drove to Pensacola to visit family. Were chased by storms and tornadoes all the way. Spent the night in northern Alabama. Luckily we were on the bottom floor of the Holiday Inn, because a tornado came through during the night and took off the roof.

As a young man in Columbia Mo, I walked out of the bank near Stadium Blvd, only to see a tornado rolling down the road. I ducked back inside, and we took shelter in the vault. The bank was unhurt, but apartment houses just a hundred yards away had the outer walls torn off.

I lived in a small trailer court that was just a few blocks from a new development on the outskirts of Columbia. I had watched this development go up in the early nineties, and marveled that the houses and duplexes were put together without a single nail, just those spike strips that were hammered on. Cheap material, cheap construction. Had a small tornado hit the neighborhood, hardly a tornado at all(they had to have an expert come in to determine if the damage was from a tornado or straight line winds it was so small). The older houses, my trailer, were all fine. The newly completed development was trashed because of the shoddy construction.

Big storms, tornadoes, I love them, the power of them, the sheer magnificence. But I respect them as well.

When I was about 12, I mentioned to my mother that I "had my tornado dream again". She
looked at me and disbelief, and she said, "You have tornado dreams?" I'd never mentioned my
tornado dreams, but I had them at least once a month since I was very young.

Sometimes, I'm running from the tornado--sometimes I'm in a house and I'm trying to protect
myself, other times I'm chasing after the tornado and calling it names. It totally depends
on what is going on in my life.

My mom then told me that when I was about two, I was asleep in a playpen near a window. A very
large storm happened quickly and a tornado briefly touched town in our front yard. It blew out the
window onto me, as I was in my playpen. My mother said they heard me screaming, and she ran
into the room and saw the window glass all over the floor and inside the playpen. She told me
she was so afraid that I was cut all over--all she could see was the glass all over and all
she could hear was me screaming.

Turns out, I was ok. Just very scared.

I still have my tornado dreams. The dreams completely coincide with what stressors I'm dealing
with and the tornado has even represented a person (or persons) who are causing me stress.

So somewhere...in my subconscious...is a tornado that was planted in my head as the "ultimate
stress"--when I was two years old.

I find it so fascinating!

dreams started after my dad got a promotion to the corporate HQs of the monster corporation he worked for, and we moved to a bedroom suburb of NYC. I had tornado dreams for years--maybe 20 years or more? They tapered off in my late 20s. I was always trying to get to a basement, but there were more stairs than I'd thought, or I'd get to a big basement but it would be full of junk, keeping me from getting to a safe corner. And the tornadoes in the dreams seems like they had a consciousness, and were bent on getting me. Metaphor, obviously. But there must have been a certain amount of trauma instilled in me from age 5 to age 11, that stuck with me for years. Actually, after a very long hiatus of tornado dreams, I had another a few months ago. But in that dream, I looked out a window and saw the tornado coming, and went calmly through the 3-storey house, telling others that we had to go the basement, and I felt competent and able to deal with it. A big improvement! Funny I had one of those dreams again after so many years...

I've heard from others that the same thing happened to them--grew up with tornadoes, or lived in a area that had them, then moved elsewhere, and had occasional tornado dreams for years afterwards.

and emotional upheaval as the meaning behind tornado dreams. There are people who are never in nor ever see a tornado who have dreams about tornadoes; seems to be rather prevalent...

sP

take cover in a muddy ditch. My daughter was nine months old at the time and I had to cover her inside my jacket while trying to cover myself at the same time, keeping her face out of the mud.

I'd like to forget that it ever happened.

a few hours after I was born in fact, the nurse came around handing babies out to the new Moms & told them to take their babies to the basement of the hospital because there was a tornado on the ground nearby. It wiped a little town called Kipp, right off the map.

That is in this video, but it is a metaphor. The black and white checkerboard on the roof is the basement reference.


The B52's - Love Shack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leohcvmf8kM

I'll never forget seeing a field of roofs on the ground, they were underground houses. This was the 70s, and I thought I would see a lot more of them, (and perhaps different designs for flood zones). I have not heard much about them since.