Have You Ever Seen or Been in a Tornado? (cloud, may, live)

[stillkit]

Originally Posted by HighPlainsDrifter73

I remember living on the farm and seeing dust devils in the open fields on dry, warm and windy days. I thought they were so cool!

I used to think they were "cool" too, until I watched one in Bowie, Arizona take the roof off a truck stop. They get REALLY, REALLY big out there!

[RichardW]

Today is the 3rd anniversary of the date when a mega thunderstorm (for England) nearly gave us a tornado in Lincoln. It was about 3 miles east where it started.

[Sandhillian]

There were a lot of them when I lived in Nebraska. We stayed in the basement in the NW corner. It got so that we didn't take them as seriously as we should have because they can do some really serious damage. I have heard a lot of strange stories about things happening during tornados (like furniture ending up outside).

[DLK55]

Blackhawk County, Iowa in 1966. I saw more than enough to leave me with a healthy respect for nature before my mother yelled at me to quit gawking and practically threw me down into the storm cellar. It didn't hit us directly or wipe our farm out but did enough damage that it was pretty much a total loss.

We had one touch down about a mile and a half from us six years ago. My mother happened to be visiting and while it was storming one afternoon, the sky changed to a funny yellow hue and the wind picked up drastically, suddenly. This time I was the one to shuffle her off to our basement. and a couple of minutes later the tornado siren went off. I didn't see that one and it didn't affect us much but it was an experience.

[stillkit]

Originally Posted by DLK55

Blackhawk County, Iowa in 1966. I saw more than enough to leave me with a healthy respect for nature before my mother yelled at me to quit gawking and practically threw me down into the storm cellar. It didn't hit us directly or wipe our farm out but did enough damage that it was pretty much a total loss.

We had one touch down about a mile and a half from us six years ago. My mother happened to be visiting and while it was storming one afternoon, the sky changed to a funny yellow hue and the wind picked up drastically, suddenly. This time I was the one to shuffle her off to our basement. and a couple of minutes later the tornado siren went off. I didn't see that one and it didn't affect us much but it was an experience.

As a child, my Grandma had survived a killer tornado in tiny little Hendrix, OK. She recalled the men in the cellar wrapping a chain around the door frame and holding it shut while the tornado tried to rip it off and suck them out.

For the rest of her life, she would head for the cellar every time she saw what she called "a cloud." Any family members within grabbing distance went with her and we kids spent what seemed to be an inordinate amount of time below ground, choking on coal-oil latern fumes and cheap perfume. Hendrix had a community cellar which would hold nearly the whole town (still does) and Mom was just about as bad about running to it when the weather turned threatening.

I hated going to the cellar, but now wish I had one.

[VeraBlue]

I've been in a structure that took tornado damage twice, both happened in Oklahoma. The second time was the scariest.

I was watching TV in my condo during a storm, and I wasn''t too concerned until they announced that there was one on the ground about a mile away. At that point I grabbed both my cats and a battery operated radio, put them in the bathroom, and kept watching. First the cable went out, then the power, and then I heard that screechy freight-train sound, at which point I high-tailed it to the bathroom myself.

There were a lot of loud thumps and the entire structure shook. After it was over, I fully expected to open that bathroom door and see daylight pouring in from what was left of the roof and walls, but no. There was very little damage to the building itself, although the roof had been peeled off the car port and a short decorative wall that hid the row of gas meters was missing entirely. There was a lot of damage just across the street, however, with uprooted trees, missing roofs, and a few cars thrown around.

[mkfarnam]

Not in Kansas, Dorothy Gale, Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz, Sound Bite

Wicked witch laugh, The Wizard of Oz, Wizard of Oz, Wicked Witch of the West, Margaret Hamilton, Sound Bite

[StillwaterTownie]

View my experience riding a tornado out in a car at Stillwater's Friday the 13th Tornado Scroll down the page some for story.

[yachtcare]

When I was in high school, 1976, I remember watching a funnel cloud over my home town of Warren, MI, from the school.

Shortly after I moved to SW Florida in 1991(March or April I think it was)a small tornado struck the Edison Mall, I was in a book store in the middle of the mall. Heard lots of ruckus and some screams, but didnt see anything, as the power went out, and it was a probably 30 seconds or so til the emergency lighting came up. Some damage to cars and light posts in the parking lot, and I think a door was knocked off it's hinge at one entrance, a few windows blown out of an office building across the street.

Waterspouts and funnel clouds are somewhat common in SW Florida, the ones that do make it to the ground are typically F 0, about 60-70 mph and tear up pool cages, and downspouts. Usually no big damage.

Back in '03, on my way home home from work one evening I had my closest encounter. The weather turned very severe, and wind came up hard. I pulled my small car(a ragtop Chevy Cavalier)onto a small driveway entrance. There was (and still is a fence there) that has flags at regular intervals down it's length, about 200 feet to the intersection. As I sat there for a few seconds, in heavy rain, windshield wipers at full tilt, the car rocking around, the rain suddenly stopped. The closest flag to me on the corner of the fence went limp, but could see rain and the other flags blowing straight out to my left. I rolled the window down and could watch a line of frothy white rain pounding the pavement in a semi circle move slowly off to my left. As quickly as it had stopped the heavy rain began again, and went down to a drizzle again a few seconds later. As I watched, the funnel shape became clear as it passed into the field that had just been cleared for construction and kicked up the loose dust to reveal the funnel shape. I can only surmise that I was, for a brief few seconds, inside the "eye" of that small, and undoubtedly(thankfully) F 0 tornado as it passed over me.

In '04 I was here for Hurricane Charley when it came ashore as a cat 4. The house I was in was shaken several times while we listened to a loud rumbling/rattling pass by, couldnt see out because of the storm shutters, but I always assumed those rumbles might have been tornadoes passing close by.

Fast forward to September 17 2007. I was returning to my place of business when I noticed off to the south a funnel cloud undulating up and down into the clouds. It seemed far off, and wasnt anything I hadnt seen in the past. Returned to the back side of my shop (facing north) and mentioned to my employee inside that I had just seen a funnel to the south. We should unload the truck, and get things inside as I figured it would rain soon. The sky was blue, when I looked up, and over the roof of the shop saw a swirling mass of debris in the sky. Just made it inside, and threw the rool up door down when the lights went out. Followed by some loud bangs and grinding noises. I figured we were going to take a direct hit. After what seemed like a minute laying on the floor in the dark, and nothing else happening, I opened the entry door and peeked outside, just in time to see the funnel, about seventy feet up come round the east end of the building and head out over the vacant acreage to the north of the building. It did one of those snake like twisty maneuvers back and forth until it got about the mid point of the field, when it suddenly just jabbed strait down into the ground like a knife. Throwing mud and weeds up, it continued across the field and strait into the side of a house blowing parts of its privacy fencing and flipping a boat and trailer up and over in the process. About then the rain came so heavy I couldnt see the other side of the 35 foot wide service alley behind the shop. No one injured, but carports downed and lots of roof damage to some apartments, cars piled on top of one another. This one was designated an F 1, with about 110 mph peak winds.

There was a funnel cloud earlier this summer that I saw. Another F 0 touched down in the north end of town about a month back, flipping a car up on end against a garage.(didnt see that one)
About three weeks back saw the waterspout off Sanibel Island.

Yep, they're fairly common around here, but typically weak, and rarely cause any big amount of damage.

[jsherman9901]

I went through a tornado in Altus, OK, in 1982. I watched virtually the entire thing. I was in one of the dormitories at Altus AFB when the storm built to the west of the base. It started with baseball-sized hail, then about 5 minutes later, the funnel began to form. I watched in total fascination from a second-story balcony; when pieces of the roof off the building next to mine started ripping off and spiraling up into the air, I decided that "discretion was the better part of valor".

I went downstairs, found an open door, and literally dived headfirst into a bathroom -- only to find that about 6-7 other people had gotten there ahead of me I was in there for 30 seconds at best, felt my ears pop due to the low pressure, then ran outside to see a gorgeous white funnel that was snaking up into the air for what seemed like at least 1000'. It was moving straight up the water-covered runway, which made it white in color. I'd always heard that tornadoes sounded like trains, but this one didn't -- it sounded like a giant vacuum cleaner! It did major damage to the aircraft on the base; no one was killed on the base itself, but there were two deaths about 5 miles northeast of the base when the storm destroyed a mobile home.