April and may tornados

May 2, 2011

Well last week was the week that was! Never in the 10 years I have been a storm spotter have I lived through such an eventful weather week. My preference on weather spotting is usually limited to snow. But the last few years I have shown a little propensity to knowing when its time for a storm to spawn a tornado.

While I am fascinated by the clouds and updrafts and bowlines and hook echos and the jet stream, I do not get out and chase down a storm and deliberately place myself into the path of a large roaring funnel cloud. I have never envisioned myself as being the main character in the movie “Twister”.

Years ago I was fascinated by an interesting cloud formation and was outside standing in the bed of the pickup and gazing at its awesome horrible beauty when my mother looked out and saw me. She saw the rotation and knew exactly what was going on and started yelling at me to get my stupid self into the building. We barely made it in when the sucking started and opened all the doors and the whooshing sound was heard. That little whip of a tornado touched down about 3 miles from us and turned over a few cars. I think I was really ‘hooked’ on the hooks after that!

My husband and I were in Oxford early last Wednesday and just missed getting our bumper snatched off by the monster that devastated Pine Flat. The deadly calm and the weird green hue were right there and we raced down 9w. I watched the sky in the mirror and saw nothing but a black rain wrapped cloud. That was a tornado that no one would see until it was on top of them. Seeing the damage the next day was sobering.

On Friday I had to drive through Chickasaw County to go to Columbus to make the yearly pilgrimage to the W to load up one daughter’s belongings and bring it all home for the summer. As we traveled on 8, my second daughter started seeing the debris hanging in the trees that were still standing and then seeing all of the ones that were snapped like they were dry brittle twigs. The awesome and fearful power of the storms that scourged that area became evident.

Living with tornados in the southern states is like no other region. We can have all the sirens in the world blaring out warnings and the TVs telling us to take cover. The hard truth is, in our region, most of the time you can’t see them because of the lay of the land, and the trees, and ours are usually embedded in rain soaked clouds and all we see is a darkness that is touching the ground.

I can only hope that some how, we will all eventually have a storm safe shelter within our homes and that we are not ever again hit by the near perfect conditions that created all the super cell tornado spawning of last week. I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say, I don’t want to have to be out looking at those clouds for any other reason other than to say, hmm it looks like its going to storm.