Interesting tornado article (California: houses, living in, safe)

[STLCardsBlues1989]

Great read.

02/07/2009 - Remembering the '59 tornado - STLtoday.com (http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/story/7B053944CB123F2386257556007876DB?OpenDocument - broken link)

[Silvermouse]

That was a great article. Thanks for sharing it!

[stepka]

That was interesting to me too. I see you're from SE MO--home of the big bad tornadoes in MO. We lived there for 10 years and I always wanted to see a tornado (though from a safe place), but that was not to be--we had lots of near misses though--in 2006, we went to the basement 6X that summer, and I'm not particularly jumpy. I would not live in a house w/o a basement if I had a choice.

[Curmudgeon]

Memories! In 1959 we were living in Virginia, right outside of Quantico -- the Marine Corps base and FBI Academy. We lived in the woods in a brick home my parents had built -- one of about 15-20 homes on a short road. Sometime during the night or early morning a tornado touched down and swept between our house and our next-door neighbor's. It sounded like a freight train coming through.

On the edge of our property was a very large, tall oak tree. In the morning we discovered the 50-foot wide path the tornado ripped up in our and our neighbor's lawns between the houses and the huge tree had been twisted until it fell into the woods behind our house leaving a 70 foot spire of mangled wood reaching into the sky.

Had the tree fallen the other way, I wouldn't be here writing about it.

[DeanMoore]

my dad lived near there somewhere in 59. said it was pretty wild. made him dislike Missouri weather after that. he lived his golden years in California, where there is little weather to speak of...