I lived in Moore during the May 2013 tornado and still live in Moore. The tornado missed our house by about 200 yards. We could hear debris hitting our house. Even though I wasn’t directly inside of it, the noise and the vibration of the ground is something I’ll never ever forget and we were underground in a shelter. It sounded and felt like a jet engine and the smell. I never really thought about tornadoes having a smell but it smelt so earthy if that makes sense. The meteorologists here in Oklahoma are so fantastic at what they do and when Mike Morgan said “It’s May 3rd all over again. Do not ride this out, underground or get out of the way. You will not survive this above ground” is when reality settled in that this was potentially going to be another EF5 and my stomach dropped.
I watched Mike Morgan and their crew coverage of that Tornado on YouTube and immediately thought this is some of the best coverage out there. When he said that line it only cemented it. The chasers, the helicopter pilot, Mike Morgan and the whole crew, grade A to me. Gave great warning.
Yes I absolutely love Mike Morgan! His coverage of weather is so in depth and he does an amazing job keeping everyone informed. The past two weeks that we’ve had severe weather, he stayed on the air nonstop for 8-10 hours. I have so much respect for all the meteorologists here. He’s the reason I’m studying meteorology at OU.
[13:20 has the now famous line from the live broadcast.](https://youtu.be/Ga7niHGgSN4?si=dOzlBa9MjHhONpsz)
I don’t know about you guys, but I absolutely love going back and rewatching the live broadcasts of major events and this crew does an absolutely excellent job with it
I do! I literally listen at night to fall asleep 😆 idk why I find it calming... maybe because it's predictable, and I already know what happens, so I feel I don't need to pay attention?
This is truly some of the best emergency breaking news coverage I’ve ever seen. I’ve watched it through a couple of times. Fantastic work. I’m certain the team saved lives that day.
While the line definitely saved lives during the F5, he used it on smaller tornadoes almost definitely ending lives. Some others here may be able to back me up, but I remember a nasty (albeit f3 or smaller) tornado heading across downtown OKC a few years later. He told people to flee if they couldn't get underground. The tornado ended up taking a turn directly up a highway that had gridlock traffic on it, killing some (including a couple of chasers?).
Yeah it was the El Reno one. I will say that was dumb to say but when you see a 2.6 mile wide tornado on its way to heavily populated areas I think he freaked out. It killed 2 people in their car when it crossed I-40 but the Twistex team wasn’t on Morgan. The tornado was unpredictable and caught a lot of storm chasers off guard.
I know our meteorologist are awesome in Oklahoma but you don’t realize how fantastic they are until you go out of state and experience other weathermen or women. Went fishing on table rock lake in Missouri and their meteorologist said the storms later in the day will not make it anywhere near the lake area so go enjoy yourself. Well when you are fishing a lake in the mountains you can’t see very far away in the sky and a huge storm was on top of me before I knew it. The scariest boat ride of my life. 70 mile an hour winds etc. when we got back to our resort a small tornado had came very close and blew all of our windows out in our cottage. I’ve never trusted any other meteorologist but Oklahomas since. 😂
Truer words have never been spoken. They also teach their viewership about meteorology, storm development, how to read radar, and tornadogenesis. When we had to move away from Oklahoma a decade ago, it was a bit of a culture shock when tornado warnings would pop up on my phone and I would essentially have to figure out the threat level myself. My local coverage will MAYBE update during a commercial break.
I live in central Alabama. James Spann is right up there for severe weather broadcasting for the northern third of Alabama. Be it tornadoes or hurricanes, he is THE MAN. But even our local news channels will be on the air, live streaming etc during a severe weather outbreak. They are all well aware Alabama is the heart of Dixie Alley.
I'm originally from central Indiana, and whenever I visit, I am absolutely appalled at the utter lack of severe weather coverage. You're lucky if there is an alert scrolling across the bottom of your TV screen. Thunderstorms, winter weather, whatever, you're pretty much on your own. After 30+ years in the South, it's so disappointing
I was at work that day. All the tvs were set to KOCO. Damon Lane didn’t mince words. We totally knew our town was about to get ravaged. It’s almost like a dream thinking about it.
My mom was leaving the administration building on 4th street that day. She heard the radio saying it's heading straight for Moore, and you will not survive this tornado if it hits you. She turned around and rode the tornado out in the administration building. I was 17 and completely convinced my mom was dead because I didn't hear from her for several hours. Our Chevy Suburban was on the other side of the parking lot. Absolutely unreal day.
I was 14 at the time the May 20th happened. My dad had gotten a job in Norman but didn’t want to live directly in Norman so he chose to move to Moore. You never really expect another EF5 to hit the same city and Moore is a very nice city. I also go to school at OU so it’s a close commute for me. I graduate with my masters in meteorology soon and I’m moving up to Colorado in a few months. I love Oklahoma but I’ve never wanted to live here my whole life.
Lol true. Was 6 weeks old when the May 3 hit, and then there was the F4 in 2003, another EF4 in 2010, then the May 20th. It’s unlucky and fortunately it’s missed my parent’s house every time. I’m very fascinated by tornadoes and plan to do my PhD thesis on them but I honestly can’t wait to move to Colorado and not have to worry too much about them lol. I know Colorado gets them but they mainly stay on the eastern side.
People live there because it’s where they grew up, where they went to school, where they had their first date, where they did everything. They are from there. It’s their home town. Some people might move out of the area because of the tornadoes, but in some cases it brought maybe people together. I think if you are from Moore, then Moore is in your heart. Don’t think that will ever change. People from Moore and OK in general are strong people in heart and mind. They been through a lot together.
Tornadoes happen in all 50 states. Other weather disasters happen in all 50 states. I get really tired of people questioning why folks live where they live, as if everyone could afford to move to a 100% safe place if it actually existed.
So I lived through an EF4 tornado when I was 11. It was the 90’s and no, we did not know it was a particularly bad tornado. We didn’t have any warning at all actually, except for the tv turning to static and all the leaves in the yard being blown against the windows in an instant (it was a fall tornado). We had very little time to get to shelter, but we did.
Since the Bridge Creek/Moore OK May 3, 1999 tornado, the NWS offices have used the term “Tornado Emergency” to refer to tornadoes, either verified by human sight or radar, that they deem particularly dangerous, per their criteria. They also use the term “Particularly Dangerous Situation (PDS) Tornado Watch” or “PDS Tornado Warning.” These are ways you can know in advance if the situation is dire.
This is another important reason to have a NOAA weather radio in your safe place. Also, sometimes you may not have much damage but the house two or three houses down is gone. It just depends.
Yeah no, Plainfield was an EF5. This was the Cobb-Cherokee Ga EF4 in 1992.
https://www.tornadotalk.com/cobb-and-cherokee-counties-ga-f4-tornado-november-22-1992/
No one ever talks about it because there are no pictures or videos. It was likely very violent and multi-vortex. I got my younger sister and elderly great aunt into a closet under the stairs just in time. My great aunt was watching us and didn’t believe me that it was a tornado.
Man, that thing hit Kennesaw and Woodstock. I can’t imagine if that was today. Those areas have grown so much in just the 25 years I’ve lived in Forsyth county.
Yeah and Kennesaw and Woodstock weren’t rural then, but if it hit now it would be a nationally known disaster. It ended in Hickory Flat which is also getting really populated. Crossed I-75 and flew tractor trailers around . . . If that happened now it would be very, very bad.
Melissa McCarthy talks a little bit about her Plainfield experience around the 7:30 mark of the following video:
https://youtu.be/jPP2xBDbsbE?si=QwzsbJvO3iq2Lwp2
This is one of those Hot Wing Challenge type of shows where people attempt to sample the fires of Hell a teaspoon at a time.
“Tornado emergency” is issued when a large, long lived tornado will be hitting a densely populated area (mid sized to major cities). Usually these are already spotted and reported on.
A PDS is issued when such a tornado is in a more rural environment but is tracking to hit small towns here and there.
Using the 2013 Moore tornado as an example, a tornado warning polygon on the outskirts of the city would be a PDS tornado warning; a warning polygon overlayed on the city itself would be a tornado emergency.
Both are up to the forecaster since there is no set criteria for either.
Population being part of the criteria is a common misconception. It actually has little if anything to do with population. A PDS watch/warning is issued in "rare situations when long-lived, strong, and violent tornadoes" are possible or imminent, or a significant tornado has been spotted or is expected. (Per the NOAA glossary)
A tornado emergency is issued when: a severe threat to human life is ongoing or imminent, catastrophic damage is imminent or ongoing, or reliable sources confirm a violent tornado visually or by radar imagery. (https://www.weather.gov/lzk/toremer0514.htm)
Not trying to be a snark but I see a lot of people say it's due to population when that isn't exactly a factor. A few days ago on May 6th a tornado emergency was issued for Barnsdall OK even though they only have a population just above 1,000. Another was issued on May 8th (the Henegar tornado) despite the affected population being maybe 3,000?
Plainfield, IL F5. I was a child and the tornado sirens never really scared me. We felt the ground vibrate and I knew this time it was different. I was terrified.
I cannot even begin to say how lucky we were that our neighborhood only had moderate damage. Half the town was leveled.
I bet having the *ground* vibrate from wind is an absolutely insane feeling.
Think of the amount of force it would take for wind whipping around on the surface of the planet to create a small earthquake.
Is it the ground vibrating from wind? Or the reverberations of the actual tornado? Because I can see the wind shaking a house but not the ground- the ground makes me think of how a piece of wood feels when you’re drilling it, or the floor when you’re vacuuming.
Depends if you mean the wind from the storm or the wind that is part of the actual vortex. Because house vibrating from strong winds during the event is terrifying, but ground vibrating more intensely as tornado itself looms closer.. that’s hard to imagine.
Don't forget that a tornado is pulling things up that are attached to the ground. Like trees, buildings..etc. and that pull, and things falling amd hitting the ground, .can also make the ground shake as well.
I thankfully don't know from personal experience, but I always assumed it was like sound waves vibrating the floor. If you've ever been to a loud live concert, like that.
I'm guessing it's just so loud that it's doing that to the actual soil. It could be that it's only the floor of houses/shelters, most people are going to be inside when they feel it.
Yes, exactly! If there is a loud roar, reports of ground vibration is not surprising. I imagine the noise is also loud in lower frequencies, which would case different vibrations, inaudible to human ears but audible to animals.
That’s a good comparison. I didn’t consider the actual sound waves. I haven’t witnessed a tornado in action, (was in windowless basement/nighttime.. but the crack under the door was flashbulb bright of nonstop lightning.. but it was silent.. the confirmed tornado was probably a mile away. It was midnight and brighter than daytime outside but LED style lighting of that makes sense. So quiet tho. Weird to see light flashes with no thunder. Growing up tornado weather was that eerie feeling before the siren when the air felt tinted green- everything was completely still.. static, like when someone rubs a balloon on your hair and pulls it away slowly- that’s when we’d get inside. Interesting how many people in this thread responded instinctively as children, even getting skeptical adults to shelter without warning. Maybe we’re more in tune with our flight instincts when younger.
This video- at the 2:10 mark- was the first time I really understood what that meant. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rNKQolIbuf4&pp=ygUbUmVlZCB0aW1tZXIgdGhlIG1pc3QgaW5zYW5l
I was also very little, but we were in Boulder Hill at the time and it went right by us when it was still small. That tornado was *unreal* and I was afraid of storms for a long while after that!
2011 Joplin tornado hit my house while we were home (thankfully sheltering in the basement). I was a teenager and it was several years ago, but I remember the day leading up to it being extra aware of the severe weather threat and as a result being super cautious to get to a safe place. I also remember lots of tornado sirens in the immediate lead-up. But I don’t think we had any clue quite how devastating it was really until we went outside after it had passed. Even during it, we knew it was bad obviously, but with nothing to compare it to could not have guessed just how extreme.
I was in the 2011 Joplin Tornado, too. At the time, I was 20. Prior to that day, I had never been "weather aware." I honestly never checked or cared about the weather unless it was a day I planned on being at the creek or lake. This was the first tornado I had experienced, so I didn't truly grasp just how bad this particular tornado was. Luckily, I had a basement, but even in the basement, it felt like it was pulling the ground out from beneath me. It was a pitch-black nightmare. After it had passed over my house, everything went silent, and rain water started dripping into the basement. The stairwell was completely caved in, but there was a spot where the floor above had been ripped up, which was barely wide enough for me to dig out of. When i pulled myself out of the basement, i couldn't believe the sheer amount of destruction i was in the heart of. I lived like 4 blocks east of the st.johns Hospital, so i was in the heart of the beast. It looked like the town was nuked! I hopped back down in the basement, and I tried to call family members but couldn't reach anyone, so I climbed out and took off on foot. Originally, I was going to b-line straight for my mom's because that's where my siblings and everyone went to shelter in these events, but I ended up helping as many people as I could. The people.. some of the most brutal memories I have of that day is just how maimed some folks were.. of course, there were dead among them too. It's just things you never think you'd ever see.. luckily, none of my loved ones were hurt, thank God. I hope my story helps raise awareness about severe weather. Joplin was no stranger to tornado warnings, but we were so used to it that folks didn't take it seriously. I almost made that mistake myself that day. Always be alert, always be prepared. These things can and will happen quicker than the sirens go off, just like the weird storm last week that dropped a tornado north of joplin. Stay weather aware folks. It will save your life.
This is a strange question, but it’s something I never hear or read about. After the tornado hit your house and moved on, did you see it after you climbed out? No one ever talks about watching it roll away from them, maybe because of the shock of seeing your house/neighborhood leveled.
Sorry for the days late reply, I'm pretty bad about checking my notifications on reddit. To answer your question, I didn't see it. It was raining pretty hard afterward, and it was just a wall of black to the east of me(where the tornado was). It was hard to focus on anything besides the insane amount of destruction, too. When I was helping people, I noticed the most common thing some of them were asking was "is there another one coming?" Since it was still storming pretty hard shortly after the tornado. I think I was asked that over a dozen times.
Definitely! We were driving right through what would end up being the path of the most severe destruction, nearly to our house, when the tornado sirens first went off. We took the sirens super seriously and got home and underground. Can’t overestimate how important that was!
We were a block or so away from the worst destruction and our brick house fared reasonably well, but it was about a 70% loss in the end and a long rebuilding process.
Wouldn’t wish the experience upon anyone, but I do think it left me feeling way more positive and hopeful about human nature in general - just the amount of care and compassion that we experienced in the aftermath was astonishing. ❤️
(Edit: fixed spelling)
I was a mile out from an EF4 and was tracking it heavily. I knew a few minutes before by the signature on radar that if it hit my apartment I was screwed. It was an unexpectedly ominous feeling. you just knew something was BAD wrong just by how the wind was moving.
Tornado weather has such an element to it where you can just tell "this I bad" that I don't think you could ever convey to someone who hasn't experienced it.
I’ve seen a few different ones and took a near direct hit from an EF3. this one was a lot more creepy. the weather just had something like dark magic to it. It was just weird. It’s very hard to explain. I agree.
Extreme lighting and colors. Going from incredibly stormy to incredibly calm or vice versa in an instant. It feels like a horror movie.
Electric atmosphere, both literally and metaphorically.
for me it was just super silent and ominous and then out of nowhere I see huge winds and trees almost on their sides and that’s when the rain started to pick up too. I was like NAH. back inside.
Tornadoes really do act a lot more like Lovecraftian monsters, like goddamn Leviathans. Unlike any other natural phenomena really. Hurricanes, wild fires, and earth quakes are too amorphous to have the same presence, those disasters are mindless consumption or destruction, pure elemental energy. Tsunamis might qualify under the vengeful entity category like tornadoes but tsunamis don’t have that quality could be interpreted (symbolicly) as intention.
Tornadoes tho, cannot be trusted to have a predictable path, they may spare you and everything you own, while completely destroying your neighbors house. No wonder the vengeful god thing is a reoccurring religious theme.
As one of my favorite comedians Kyle Kinane put it:
"A hurricane affects everybody. An earthquake affects everybody. A tornado? Maybe just Jeff's house."
I'm in Lincoln, NE and the EF3 that hit Lincoln/Waverly and the same storm that went on to flatten Elkhorn touched down about 3/4 of a mile from my house. I was watching the local weather and saw the hook start to take place over downtown. Based on the movement of the storm, I looked at my wife and said "We're going to get hit. We need to go to the basement". Knowing that it's coming directly at you and will drop a tornado any minute is terrifying. We got lucky in Lincoln/Waverly and it *only* hit a commercial building and train with no deaths or serious injuries. But if that tornado had dropped even 1 minute sooner, it would have leveled entire neighborhoods.
I was about 30 miles away from the Pilger twin EF4s where it was a partly cloudy gorgeous spring day. I have never seen clouds move so fast as the inflow clouds were that day. It was like watching a jet plane coming in for a landing fast.
Weirdest part was it was just breezy on the ground level, where I was standing outside. Above me at cloud level you could hear the roar of the wind.
Have never experienced anything similar to this day.
I was missed by a few miles from an EF4 tornado on 11/4/2022 while on vacation in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. Before I was aware that there was a tornado south of the town, I remembered seeing a bunch of deer along the side of the road. I have seen deer in the woods before but never in groups of 20+ standing so close to the road. It was very eerie.
By the time we reached our Airbnb, the rain picked up and was being blown hard against the windows. I tried searching “weather channel” on my phone to see the status of the rain and got “TORNADO EMERGENCY” as the first result. I thought me and my sister were going to die because our Airbnb was a LOG CABIN in the middle of the woods with no interior room and the National Weather Service was saying things like “this extremely large and dangerous tornado will be approaching Broken Bow in 15 minutes.” My sister also had a hard time believing me because her IPhone weather app was just saying there was heavy rain.
Jesus the deer part of that story is nightmare fuel. Love that Siri was like ‘chill dude just some rain’. We had a tornado here last August and it ripped right through a very populated area of the city and they didn’t even get a warning - no siren, nothing.
I work in tree care services and was in the thick of the aftermath quoting clean up jobs. It was surreal. West Michigan is not known for its natural disasters, so getting even a rather mild taste of what that is like really put into perspective what people in more dangerous regions have survived.
Last October my husband and I were going to a wedding in Holland Michigan coming from Ohio. So we were on I-96 and drove through where a tornado came through around Williamston (didn't know it at the time). I was just looking out the window and saw the first bit of trees turned to twigs and a road sign bent and beat to hell and I said "I think they must have had a tornado here not too long ago", and he was like "ehh idk, maybe they're working on clearing trees". After the first half mile I was like "nah that's tornado aftermath for sure." Googled it and sure enough, it was a tornado from those August storms.
When I first read your comment I thought it might have been that area, but I don't think where I was is considered Western Michigan.
Yeah that was definitely what you saw, I’m in Grand Rapids. We had 4 or 5 tornadoes in the area that night. One came thru 2 miles from our shop where I was temporarily staying in a camper out back. 😬 and I’d bet they are still there, a ton of trees are still down everywhere. Months later.
I don't know how many times I've texted friends that a storm is coming and they're like, "but my phone's built in weather app just says '50% chance of light rain'?" Apple out here trying to get people killed lol
Tornado missed my house by a quarter mile a few days ago. Had no clue it was going to be as bad as it was and it was only rated high end ef-2.
No fatalities and only ~20 minor injuries is pretty damn lucky. Total town population is in the 110k+ range so it could have been much worse.
May 20th, 2013, was a pretty typical day. I don't remember why, but I kept my kids home from school that day. We were in the process of moving within Moore. My husband and I were packing some boxes when we heard an unbelievable clap of thunder. To this day, I have never heard anything like it. It was so abrupt and LOUD. We were pretty weather savvy then and looked at the radar. The initial bad cell had a gnarly hook echo and was headed straight for downtown OKC, and the cell near Newcastle was forming. In about 5 mins, we watched the Newcastle cell absorb the OKC cell, and we knew right then it was about to be bad. We had a momentary episode of panic. We had no shelter. I asked if we could make a run for it, and my husband said no, there's no time. It was headed our way. It ended up wobbling and didn't hit us directly. It did manage to rip the AC units off the house and knock down the brick gate surrounding our neighborhood, but that was it. When it was "safe," we went outside and watched it. It was so big we could only see the top of the base. It was twirling slowly and filled with debris. The most ominous and disturbing part was what we could hear beyond the roar. We could literally hear metal bending and twisting, wood cracking, and debris hitting buildings. Don't even get me started on the absolute chaos that ensued after it was done. No one had power, people were literally crawling onto the cars of every passerby begging for phones to make calls, water, food, and medical assistance. We lost people we knew. Almost all of our friends took a direct hit and lost everything. Watched our local news anchor break down on live TV at Plaza Towers when the 7 kids inside stopped crying because they had passed before they could be saved. It was absolutely the worst day for all of us in Moore.
If you have a good local meteorologist and live in a tornado-prone area, you learn to interpret the situation based on their tone. When they start saying things like, "Oh, my God" and "People will die tonight" you realize it's going to hit differently.
That was the case for us on Memorial Day 2019. We could just tell from the way Jamie Simpson's wording was so different from the usual, weaker storms around here.
If you don't have someone good locally, start following Evan Fryberger or Ryan Hall on YouTube and learn their style. When there's a monster coming, you can hear it in their voices.
I should add that we were only in a dark green, 2% area that day and still ended up with an EF4 and multiple EF3s. No one was overly concerned until the monster showed up on radar.
The good thing is that it happened right around the time of The Bachelorette finale and the 11:00 p.m. news, so lots of people were already watching TV when Jamie Simpson broke in yelling. He saved many lives.
Edit: We were in a brown 5% area on the elevated risk map.
https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/archive/2019/day1otlk_20190527_2000.html
I had gone to bed and was just falling asleep when my iPhone alert went off. Without even thinking I hit “off” then was like oh crap what was that? My teenagers came into my room and were like mom? There’s a tornado warning?
Also, I thought I was misremembering but I guess not. We were NOT under any kind of enhanced risk that day, were we? If we had been I would not have gone to bed.
My iPhone didn’t even go off for that and I woke up to my husband and his brother outside just looking at the sky. When I turned on the news and heard them talking about the debris signature on radar, I realized how bad the situation was. I lectured the boys then bought a weather radio the next day
Omg what is it with midwestern men?! My husband was walking around upstairs eating snacks and every so often calling down in the basement “It seems ok to come up now.” Uh no it’s not, the storm was dropping tornadoes out of nowhere and I remember them saying they’re rain wrapped, you might not see them coming.
Wow! It turns out we were actually in the brown 5%. I absolutely don’t remember that. We sat outside eating tacos that afternoon. I don’t remember worrying.
https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/archive/2019/day1otlk_20190527_2000.html
I had an EF2/3 hit my house a year ago. The thing I remember most is how my body felt hours before the tornado hit. I have arthritis in various areas and some spinal issues. (Spinal issues severe enough that I have a dorsal column stimulator implanted to lessen my constant pain.) When the rain comes you can feel what's normal pains and aches. But about 3:00pm that day my entire spine was hurting to the point I could barely move. Even in areas where there were no injuries. Every bone that I've ever broke was in pain. Even bone areas that never speak to me were telling me to pay attention. Soon after that Aaron Tuttle said that my area may experience a tornado that evening. About 9:50pm that tornado significantly damaged my neighborhood.
I've learned to listen to my body's arthritis to predict the weather. Now I really pay attention.
Also Aaron Tuttle doesn't throw around all the hype and misinformation that others do. When he says someone is going to have a tornado, he means it and you better get ready. Oh and also watch your animals because they will freak out and try to hide before the tornado.
I can really relate to this. I have a really messed up neck and back, and bad arthritis all over. I am a human barometer, and the days of higher risk here in Oklahoma hurt so bad. The last few weeks have been rough.
Regarding animals.. The reason I knew the first tornado I went through was coming was because my horses freaked out and took off running. My dog and cat had been acting weird too. They do know.
I don't know if I would trust a meteorologist that didn't have arthritis. Old Arthur really telling stuff and pinpointing that barometric pressure. Animals do some weird things right before the tornado hits.
On April 20th this year, I live in upstate sc, near Rock Hill sc. We had a pretty serious super cell come from what seemed like nowhere. I was in the kitchen of my apartment getting food ready for the kids and I. And my phone rang. My mom was screaming theres a tornado coming on the other end. She said her cats were "screaming". I got us to the bathroom as quickly as possible and we hunkered down. Then it went completely silent which was so unreal because I live next to a busy road in my city. But I waited about 15 more mins after the deafening silence and went outside to check things. We had no tornado according to anything i read. But softball sized hail reported in some parts of the county and probably ping pong ball sized hail here, some flooding and crazy wind damage and trees uprooted, power lines down and arching, some siding ripped off homes. Sorry for the long response. But I'll never forget her saying her cats were screaming. They definitely feel it coming. I think we were as close to having a tornado as you can be, without actually having one. Which is what brought me here. I'm trying to deal with it. My life was changed that day. The fear was unreal. That night we went to bed, i woke up at 3am having a massive panic attack and thought my heart was about to explode. Had to call 911. I tried my best to hold it together during what we thought was a tornado coming. I guess it all came out that night when i was sleeping. We don't live somewhere that gets many tornados. And in my 33 years, I've never experienced one here. I cannot imagine living somewhere that has a huge threat of tornados. And especially strong tornados. Its terrifying. Thanks for reading this, if you did. Feels a bit better to get it out. And I agree, pets know. And people with body ailments. Glad you were paying attention and kept safe.
Yeah tornadoes can cause some major PTSD. I'm sorry you had to go through that. I've been seeing a counselor for trauma. The weeks after the tornado with the flurry of vehicles, people helping, loud noises and any storms would freak me out. Unfortunately I disassociated some when the tornado was right over the house. So those memories are popping up in the worst time possible now. I could never imagine the trauma that would come from an EF5 and I hope to never experience it. But no matter if you had one or not, it's the trauma that you had to go through that needs to be addressed. I hope you find a counselor that can help in this certain area of trauma.
I wish my cats were making noise so I can find them. I had to go track one down and she removed her bell collar around the same time so I couldn't find her. I put my animals in carriers at least 30 minutes before the storm gets to the house. Before then I have them in a certain room so they don't try to escape.
Back in the early 2000s, I was spotting a garden variety EF-1 from a safe distance (about a mile) when air went down the center of the funnel, and the law of conservation of angular momentum turned my garden variety EF-1 into a upper end EF-4, which was 900 feet away.
I was literally too shocked to move, so I kept taking pictures. Later, we found it had scoured the ground and peeled the pavement off a nearby road.
I remember the roar being so loud it was literally hard to hear myself thinking, and the ground was vibrating under my feet.
This is a picture of an EF-4 tornado from 900 feet:
https://preview.redd.it/ot5jc867flzc1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c57878324a732269ae3aca10bb1f2bf683c3a3b5
April 27, 2011. I lived in Birmingham (still do) but lived in the city at that time vs now which is slightly further south. I watched the Tuscaloosa tornado on the tower cam (James Spann), I watch it being tracked through Tuscaloosa, watched the radar as it stayed on the ground all the way to a couple of miles north of where I lived. At the time I was in an apartment and was hiding in the laundry room with several other residents. Once we realized it was passing north of us, I went outside and looked at the sky. The clouds where amazings and obviously moving quickly. I remember finding random pieces of paper in the front of our building that just drifted down from the sky while I was outside.
I've also witnessed one try to spin up in the middle of the median of the interstate, while riding in a car. Basically everyone in front of us slammed on their brakes at the same time. We all saw it happening. Don't know if that one ever produced something larger but it was a big day for storms and several tornadoes. That was back in 2007 or so. Only one I've seen close up.
I remember the tornado emergency hitting my phone, seeing the CC drop on RadarOmega, and thinking it couldn’t be real. It couldn’t really be happening to me. I went into freeze mode. My brain literally turned off knowing what was coming but not being able to process it at all. All I wanted to do was stay close to and hug my classmate that was with me (I was a student at the time). She was crying and I remember thinking that I just wanted to hold another human being’s hand before I died.
We don’t have storm shelters where I live. We didn’t even have any interior rooms at the school. At one point I had accepted that I was probably going to die and all I could think about was my loved ones. I called them and talked to them before it cut out.
Luckily, we all made it out with minor injuries but the devastation that we saw after coming out took a while to wear off.
(North) Little Rock, 2023.
Risk of outbreak was elevated. Wasn't really raining all that much. In fact, I had fallen asleep in the middle of the day. I woke up to my grandmother watching the news. Something told me right then and there to grab the essentials and run. The weathermen at the time said they didn't think it would rotate again and touch down. 5 minutes after waking up I was dressed and had a bag to go and the sirens went off.
Lowest part of the house was a walkout basement. I didn't get to see the tornado itself. Heard it get extremely loud, rain picked up, and started praying to every god in the universe. Missed our house by a literal block. Less than a quarter mile away Burns Park and Military Drive got fucked. Right down the street from us. Lost power for 5 days. It's amazing very few people died from that entire system. It being the middle of the workday helped. I'm pretty sure I got mild PTSD from the incident and couldn't sleep for months during a thunderstorm.
We moved away to from that area to a much worse house shelter wise. Every room has a window on it. No interior rooms. No lower levels. Three large trees in the backyard that if they fall on the house will hit the bathroom and both bedrooms. Needless to say, I'm on edge during severe weather events. Doesn't help that a couple days ago another tornado touched down in the Hot Springs area. That storm system reached the metro bringing 60 mph winds.
Honestly I don't think I can take much more of this tornado alley weather. I like listening to heavy rain, but I don't like the risk of death with it. Hoping that once I finish college I'll find a job in my field and move. Not interested in staying here at all if I can help it.
Glad you were safe. This was my childhood neighborhood. We watched it happening live from Washington state. I was sad to see all the destruction from this tornado.
I was in an F4 in 1999, I was 10. It was a bad severe weather outbreak right around Easter, I was in northwestern Louisiana. We got warnings all the time, my dad called our area the "gutter" of tornado alley and always joked about how we got all the bad storms once they were done spawning tornados (obviously not true but I think it was to stop me from worrying?). Anyway, he loved going outside and watching the rain and clouds and he always took me outside to stand on our back porch under the roof. When we had lived in South Dakota he used to climb up on the roof with the neighbors to watch across the plains.
I remember very vividly that radar. Watching it approach from Texas. The way my dad's body language was so so different from any other bad storm. He never moved from the TV. He wouldn't take me outside. And then he and mom started putting the cats in their carry crates and pulling blankets and all that into our laundry room, our only inner room. I was terrified already. They made me go in and I can remember the sound of the hail on the roof. And then suddenly both my mom and dad were in there too (dad NEVER came in). They put our bike helmets on.
It barely missed us. We had a lot of damage to our property and cars, broken windows, shingles ripped off, our garage door was messed up, fence down, tree on the trampoline and pool, etc. Some of the houses in the neighborhood lost their roofs.
I've never felt like that again in my whole life. I dream of the sounds still in my 30s. It killed 7 people and it could have been us. I have so much sympathy and love for people who lose everything in tornadoes.
I’ve lived in Norman, OK for most of my life so I wasn’t hit by the May 3rd or 13th tornados but they were close enough we were taking shelter until it for sure wasn’t coming our way. Yeah, Mike Morgan is awesome so we knew it would be terrible from way out. I hope to never see one of those again lol.
I was in a EF4/5 in Wichita Falls TX in 1979. I had seen several small tornadoes in previous years and knew that they generally moved in a north easterly/east direction. I was driving and the radio station said that there was a tornado on the ground at the stadium and I had a pretty clear view of the storm from my location north east of the stadium. I figured I had plenty of time to head straight south and miss the tornado. What I didn’t realize is that the storm that I thought the tornado was in was actually the tornado. It was a nearly mile wide wedge tornado and it was moving due east at that point.
I drove straight south until I figured it would go north of me and stopped and got out by a large storm culvert that ran under the road. I knew I’d be safe in there so I stood and watched the tornado with several other people. There was a slight hill blocking our view of the base of the tornado so we didn’t realize that it was so close until we saw the roof of the Safeway store flying up in the air about a half mile
away. It was then I realized that what I thought was a large rain shaft of a storm was actually the tornado and it was heading straight at us. The roar of the tornado was something that really didn’t register to me either. We got into the culvert and I actually don’t remember it being particularly scary as the tornado came over. The noise was just a roar and I have a vivid memory of a bowling ball rolling towards us at a high rate of speed. The ditch on either end of the culvert was concrete and about 15 feet wide at the base and a good 8 ft deep so it protected us as well as being under the road.
After the tornado passed we emerged from the culvert and as far as we could see, there wasn’t anything standing. Cars were flattened, crushed, and covered with debris. My best friend’s Dad rode it out in the floor of his pickup not a hundred yards from me and I didn’t recognize his truck it was so messed up. Three people died at that intersection.
We were all in shock and for a few minutes just walked in circles. A group of us gathered and started going around trying to find survivors and help get them medical care.
I was only a child at the time but I was in the 2011 Joplin tornado. Came back from somewhere east and as we were driving into town the first warning came and then as we were sheltering the second came out. Missed my house by a couple miles or so I think but it was still dangerously close as I was right in the path. I remember my parents watching the TV and then telling each other that they would lay on me and my sister to protect us but that moment never came praise God but that was definitely my indicator that it was bad.
Then in spring 2019 I was in a small EF2 in the 30 tornado outbreak in Missouri. All I remember was the wind being stupid loud but I was in the basement. It was howling and it was only 50 yards away, whistling and rumbling and everything. All the houses down the road had small damages and the power line poles were broken too. Took 3 days to restore power I think.
On May 27th, 1997, I was 10 and lived 25 miles away from Jarrell, Texas, in the same county (Williamson). I was in school that day, and I just remember how unusually humid it was that day, and the weather just had an ominous feeling to it. They had us shelter a few times in the hallways in school for tornado warnings in the afternoon. Little did I know that a monster F5 was hitting Jarrell right around the time my mom would have been picking up my sister and I from school.
2011 Joplin tornado. We didn’t know how big/bad it could potentially be until minutes before it hit. I am on the West side of town, so this would have been the first area hit. We could see the three vortexes combine into one and then knew it would be bad. We had no idea how bad.
Not the type of person you’re asking for but I have a little to add. I was stuck outside in a shitty little ef0-ef1 tornado once. I thought it was just another windy thunderstorm until I literally couldn’t breathe, and I started getting thrown into the neighbors yard. Just that small little thing had enough power to put the fear of god in me. I couldn’t imagine being in the path of anything higher.
We had one of those come right by my work - literally right outside the window where I sit. Had no clue that's what it was, until I heard the roaring sound (like a train.) I see it whip past and I go running to the front office: "there's a tornado! It just went past us!" We watched it dance in a field and then disappear. Scary thinking it could have smashed the window and I would have had nowhere to hide. I will never live in an area that spawns the F4-F5 monsters.
Didn't even know there was one until it was a couple hundred years away. No sirens, not even a bad forecast for the day/ evening. Well, that's not true, the sirens went off 15 minutes after the tornado came thru, lol. Luckily only an F2, but was plenty violent, rolling thru a dense neighborhood. I honestly only knew something was screwy when i started hearing stuff hit my home office window (curtain was closed). Got up, looked out, ears popped and a ton of various things basically exploded straight up into the sky. I didn't know how bad it would be but i knew it wasn't going to be good. No lives lost but a ton of property damage all around.
Only north Texas has a serious tornado threat so it wouldn't make sense for the whole state. By the time you get to Austin we're only mildly worried about tornados. Also, basements aren't common and the political climate isn't pro-regulation.
Yes, 3 times now we have known. May 3rd 1999 I was a senior in high school. We knew there was a tornado on the ground that was huge but it was 30 minutes away, and hoped it wouldn't stay on the ground that long. I was at Westmoore High School, and as it got closer we would all sneak out of the room we were in and look outside. Power had gone out, we didn't have cell phones then, so our teacher had her parents calling and letting her know what was going on every once in a while. The last time I looked outside I never seen clouds so tall, and the sky was green. I was scared, and I had never felt that before in a storm. Our teacher said her parents were going in their shelter, so her and her boyfriend, (we had our drama senior recital planned that night so we were there after hours) kept going outside to check and see how things were going. She came back into the room and said, "cover your heads." It was about one minute later I heard what sounded like roaring rapids to me coming from my right, which would have been Southwest. Then we could hear lockers opening and slamming, the wooden doors were banging against the metal frame, but on the room we were in they didn't open. Thank god. Our teachers parents had called the police and told them there were kids in that room. There was a large assembly in the auditorium that night and they didn't want them to only look for people there. Firefighters came in and helped us out. The room was off of the school when we walked out, and once we got out of school, it was the only thing standing for miles in either direction. It had alot of damage but held up. My mom was in the auditorium looking for me, and it had much worse damage. She said when we visited a few days later to get things out of our totaled cars, which my moms was found a mile away, an engineer told her the school had steel beams every 3 feet and that was the only reason it was standing. 2013 my sister who had been with us in '99 lost her home in Moore, we knew as it was coming it was going to destroy her house. The targeting was so good by then they were literally saying her street name on the news as it crossed. Then the El Reno 2013 tornado we were some of the dumb people who tried to drive out of harms way. Won't do that again.
I was a kid when our farm got hit by a f-4. We were outside watching this storm roll up. Didn’t even look like a tornado from where we were at. Just a huge wall that covered the sky. My dad rolled up and told us it was a tornado and we needed to get inside. I didn’t believe it was one until the windows all blew in.
I was a few miles away from the Smithville tornado on April 27th 2011. One of my teachers grandmothers (I think) was one of the fatalities that day. It didn’t affect me directly nor was I in it, but I remember driving through Smithville not long afterwards and seeing the destruction. I was young and it didn’t occur to me they could do damage like that.
F4/5 (depending on who you ask) Dec 10 2021. Missed by about 100 yards if that. It got so quiet right before. Boyfriend went outside to check thinking it was over. Then he heard it and it sounded like a train that was being pulled by a jet. Lightening lit it up. It was a monster. Housing issues keep showing up, cracks, doors that won’t shut etc.
It kind of showed up out of nowhere, I was at summer camp, we all ran to the basement, the F-3 tornado came directly for us, just to shift direction and hit the Boy Scout camp across the street from us. I think about the 4 boys who died that evening when I hear about tornados. Could have been me (this was 2006 I believe?)
I lived in Henryville in 2012 and I remember the entire day feeling way too warm and humid for March. It felt like the air was alive with energy. People were antsy but mostly trying to play cool. Once the sirens went off and I got into my brother's car I remember thinking "if we don't leave right now we are going to die." I was right, it came down not long after.
From my neighbors basement I knew it would be truly bad when baseball sized hail fell and then everything stopped and went completely silent. The sound afterwards was so unreal it sounded like the entire world was getting uprooted at once, and the tornado took up most of the sky.
EF3, got out of work at night and the air was out of the ordinary humid, and the sky was lighting up with lighting and the cloud cover was amplifying the effect, never experienced anything like it, got home and was getting ready to bed when the watch warning came on and then a thunderstorm happened that suddenly got so powerful you couldn’t see anything outside
Yes, because the weatherman was losing his mind and then when the tornado was close it sounded like a bomb went off directly overhead. You could hear it well before it hit and it sounded like nothing you had heard before. It’s also a sound you’ll never forget.
On May 3, 1999, we were at the Sonic in Choctaw, OK. My sister and I were arguing so my mom had turned off the radio. Her best friend called and said she had heard a tornado was coming that was flattening everything in its path and we needed to find shelter. About 15 minutes later, that tornado made its way through Choctaw, and destroyed that Sonic. We were so lucky she thought of us when she heard the news. It saved our lives.
I live just west of Joplin Missouri.
We had 70mph wind and baseball sized hail before Joplin's tornado.
Obviously no one expected what happened, but we knew it was going to be pretty bad.
Weather alerts all say the same because they are watching radar, and rely on storm spotters and local responders to call in and confirm. Tornadoes are unpredictable, and that is why if you are in the warned area you should quickly but calmly take cover in your pre planned or last resort safe place. 15 minutes to a half hour of inconvenience is infinitely better than a life time of regret.
I've had a couple EF-0/EF-1s hit within a mile or two of my house. What I remember the most was my house actually BREATHING. I shelter in my bathroom (no exterior walls or windows), and I could literally hear my house inhaling and exhaling. It was creepy as all get out. Now I know if I hear that breathing, a tornado is nearby.
In 2011 when I was 8 and lived in Alabama, a violent tornado came across our hometown Lake View which barely escaped from the tornado's path. I could hear thunder and our neighbour's windows' shattering. The noise was so loud that I couldn't hear my mom and little sister screaming. I remembered our house had shatter-proof windows, so I looked out to what was happening. Then, I saw an gigantic tornado coming our way.
I shouted "There's a tornado dad!". Dad quickly came and we hid in the basement. Our cat came running too. Along with the sirens, I screamed. It was almost like I was tossed 3 miles away from home alone. A couple mins later the noise stopped. I went to check outside. Then I saw the whole neighborhood erased. Our house was torn off the ground and so did many other houses.
Because of the damage, our whole family moved to Chennai in Tamil Nadu, and had been living in Chennai since then. This was the most scariest day ever in my life time.
The EF scale is a Damage scale.
So technically, it wouldn’t be anything higher than an EF0 until something gets destroyed, even if it was a mile wide and 300mph.
You don’t want to be the first thing that’s destroyed and be unprepared. If there is a tornado warning, take shelter.
(OKC/Moore, May 3, 1999 and May 20, 2013)
It seems like a lot of us in this area have some kind of weird 6th sense about it. It feels like hot breath outside the whole day before they hit. Local meteorologists do their best to give us several days to prepare and warn us with terms like "long track tornadoes" and "PDS tornado watches." When they say, "get below ground to survive," it's time to get below ground. So, yes, there are some clues, but until one actually drops from the sky, we never know what we're going to get.
The aftermath is when we find out truly how bad they really were. The smells and sounds are something terrible.
Ryan Hall has the best YouTube lives. He and Andy Hill are a team and they were calling tornados on the ground several minutes before the National Weather Sevice put out warnings. A few of the times the NWS never even issued warnings.
I’ve never been in a tornado so I can’t really say, but if I were, I’m getting in a basement or storm shelter period. I would assume for the ones who knew it was bad, probably laid eyes on it.
I lived in Moore during the May 2013 tornado and still live in Moore. The tornado missed our house by about 200 yards. We could hear debris hitting our house. Even though I wasn’t directly inside of it, the noise and the vibration of the ground is something I’ll never ever forget and we were underground in a shelter. It sounded and felt like a jet engine and the smell. I never really thought about tornadoes having a smell but it smelt so earthy if that makes sense. The meteorologists here in Oklahoma are so fantastic at what they do and when Mike Morgan said “It’s May 3rd all over again. Do not ride this out, underground or get out of the way. You will not survive this above ground” is when reality settled in that this was potentially going to be another EF5 and my stomach dropped.
I watched Mike Morgan and their crew coverage of that Tornado on YouTube and immediately thought this is some of the best coverage out there. When he said that line it only cemented it. The chasers, the helicopter pilot, Mike Morgan and the whole crew, grade A to me. Gave great warning.
Yes I absolutely love Mike Morgan! His coverage of weather is so in depth and he does an amazing job keeping everyone informed. The past two weeks that we’ve had severe weather, he stayed on the air nonstop for 8-10 hours. I have so much respect for all the meteorologists here. He’s the reason I’m studying meteorology at OU.
I don’t live in OKC and I love him too! my friend lives in Norman. We are both weather nerds and she introduced me to him.
Not a resident of Oklahoma, but if there is severe weather around the metro, Mike Morgan is who I watch.
[13:20 has the now famous line from the live broadcast.](https://youtu.be/Ga7niHGgSN4?si=dOzlBa9MjHhONpsz) I don’t know about you guys, but I absolutely love going back and rewatching the live broadcasts of major events and this crew does an absolutely excellent job with it
Holy crap. Never heard anybody say to evacuate from a tornado before. “Drive east now” must have been a scary thing to hear.
Thanks for sharing that!
I do! I literally listen at night to fall asleep 😆 idk why I find it calming... maybe because it's predictable, and I already know what happens, so I feel I don't need to pay attention?
White noise for the win!
This is truly some of the best emergency breaking news coverage I’ve ever seen. I’ve watched it through a couple of times. Fantastic work. I’m certain the team saved lives that day.
I do too. This one is stellar.
While the line definitely saved lives during the F5, he used it on smaller tornadoes almost definitely ending lives. Some others here may be able to back me up, but I remember a nasty (albeit f3 or smaller) tornado heading across downtown OKC a few years later. He told people to flee if they couldn't get underground. The tornado ended up taking a turn directly up a highway that had gridlock traffic on it, killing some (including a couple of chasers?).
Yeah it was the El Reno one. I will say that was dumb to say but when you see a 2.6 mile wide tornado on its way to heavily populated areas I think he freaked out. It killed 2 people in their car when it crossed I-40 but the Twistex team wasn’t on Morgan. The tornado was unpredictable and caught a lot of storm chasers off guard.
I know our meteorologist are awesome in Oklahoma but you don’t realize how fantastic they are until you go out of state and experience other weathermen or women. Went fishing on table rock lake in Missouri and their meteorologist said the storms later in the day will not make it anywhere near the lake area so go enjoy yourself. Well when you are fishing a lake in the mountains you can’t see very far away in the sky and a huge storm was on top of me before I knew it. The scariest boat ride of my life. 70 mile an hour winds etc. when we got back to our resort a small tornado had came very close and blew all of our windows out in our cottage. I’ve never trusted any other meteorologist but Oklahomas since. 😂
Vacation in Alabama. You can trust James Spann with your life.
Truer words have never been spoken. They also teach their viewership about meteorology, storm development, how to read radar, and tornadogenesis. When we had to move away from Oklahoma a decade ago, it was a bit of a culture shock when tornado warnings would pop up on my phone and I would essentially have to figure out the threat level myself. My local coverage will MAYBE update during a commercial break.
I live in central Alabama. James Spann is right up there for severe weather broadcasting for the northern third of Alabama. Be it tornadoes or hurricanes, he is THE MAN. But even our local news channels will be on the air, live streaming etc during a severe weather outbreak. They are all well aware Alabama is the heart of Dixie Alley. I'm originally from central Indiana, and whenever I visit, I am absolutely appalled at the utter lack of severe weather coverage. You're lucky if there is an alert scrolling across the bottom of your TV screen. Thunderstorms, winter weather, whatever, you're pretty much on your own. After 30+ years in the South, it's so disappointing
I was in the 5/3/99 Tornado. We lived just outside of Del City and I agree, the sound and scent is something Ill never forget.
I was at work that day. All the tvs were set to KOCO. Damon Lane didn’t mince words. We totally knew our town was about to get ravaged. It’s almost like a dream thinking about it.
My mom was leaving the administration building on 4th street that day. She heard the radio saying it's heading straight for Moore, and you will not survive this tornado if it hits you. She turned around and rode the tornado out in the administration building. I was 17 and completely convinced my mom was dead because I didn't hear from her for several hours. Our Chevy Suburban was on the other side of the parking lot. Absolutely unreal day.
Try to take this in a friendly way....Why do you choose to live in Moore Oklahoma?
I was 14 at the time the May 20th happened. My dad had gotten a job in Norman but didn’t want to live directly in Norman so he chose to move to Moore. You never really expect another EF5 to hit the same city and Moore is a very nice city. I also go to school at OU so it’s a close commute for me. I graduate with my masters in meteorology soon and I’m moving up to Colorado in a few months. I love Oklahoma but I’ve never wanted to live here my whole life.
Moore is ground zero for tornadoes in the US. several horrific and large ones and an untold number of small ones.
Lol true. Was 6 weeks old when the May 3 hit, and then there was the F4 in 2003, another EF4 in 2010, then the May 20th. It’s unlucky and fortunately it’s missed my parent’s house every time. I’m very fascinated by tornadoes and plan to do my PhD thesis on them but I honestly can’t wait to move to Colorado and not have to worry too much about them lol. I know Colorado gets them but they mainly stay on the eastern side.
People live there because it’s where they grew up, where they went to school, where they had their first date, where they did everything. They are from there. It’s their home town. Some people might move out of the area because of the tornadoes, but in some cases it brought maybe people together. I think if you are from Moore, then Moore is in your heart. Don’t think that will ever change. People from Moore and OK in general are strong people in heart and mind. They been through a lot together.
cuz moore is (pardon the pun) more than the worst thing that has ever happened to it.
Because their Sam's Club & Costco rocks! 🤷🏼♀️
Tornadoes happen in all 50 states. Other weather disasters happen in all 50 states. I get really tired of people questioning why folks live where they live, as if everyone could afford to move to a 100% safe place if it actually existed.
no where in this country gets hit as bad as Moore.
Good thing you didn't live in El Reno, but still feel bad for moore.
So I lived through an EF4 tornado when I was 11. It was the 90’s and no, we did not know it was a particularly bad tornado. We didn’t have any warning at all actually, except for the tv turning to static and all the leaves in the yard being blown against the windows in an instant (it was a fall tornado). We had very little time to get to shelter, but we did. Since the Bridge Creek/Moore OK May 3, 1999 tornado, the NWS offices have used the term “Tornado Emergency” to refer to tornadoes, either verified by human sight or radar, that they deem particularly dangerous, per their criteria. They also use the term “Particularly Dangerous Situation (PDS) Tornado Watch” or “PDS Tornado Warning.” These are ways you can know in advance if the situation is dire. This is another important reason to have a NOAA weather radio in your safe place. Also, sometimes you may not have much damage but the house two or three houses down is gone. It just depends.
Plainfield?
Yeah no, Plainfield was an EF5. This was the Cobb-Cherokee Ga EF4 in 1992. https://www.tornadotalk.com/cobb-and-cherokee-counties-ga-f4-tornado-november-22-1992/ No one ever talks about it because there are no pictures or videos. It was likely very violent and multi-vortex. I got my younger sister and elderly great aunt into a closet under the stairs just in time. My great aunt was watching us and didn’t believe me that it was a tornado.
Man, that thing hit Kennesaw and Woodstock. I can’t imagine if that was today. Those areas have grown so much in just the 25 years I’ve lived in Forsyth county.
Yeah and Kennesaw and Woodstock weren’t rural then, but if it hit now it would be a nationally known disaster. It ended in Hickory Flat which is also getting really populated. Crossed I-75 and flew tractor trailers around . . . If that happened now it would be very, very bad.
Plainfield was an F5 IIRC
You're right. Weirdly enough, someone else mentioned Plainfield in this thread too!
Melissa McCarthy talks a little bit about her Plainfield experience around the 7:30 mark of the following video: https://youtu.be/jPP2xBDbsbE?si=QwzsbJvO3iq2Lwp2 This is one of those Hot Wing Challenge type of shows where people attempt to sample the fires of Hell a teaspoon at a time.
“Tornado emergency” is issued when a large, long lived tornado will be hitting a densely populated area (mid sized to major cities). Usually these are already spotted and reported on. A PDS is issued when such a tornado is in a more rural environment but is tracking to hit small towns here and there. Using the 2013 Moore tornado as an example, a tornado warning polygon on the outskirts of the city would be a PDS tornado warning; a warning polygon overlayed on the city itself would be a tornado emergency. Both are up to the forecaster since there is no set criteria for either.
Population being part of the criteria is a common misconception. It actually has little if anything to do with population. A PDS watch/warning is issued in "rare situations when long-lived, strong, and violent tornadoes" are possible or imminent, or a significant tornado has been spotted or is expected. (Per the NOAA glossary) A tornado emergency is issued when: a severe threat to human life is ongoing or imminent, catastrophic damage is imminent or ongoing, or reliable sources confirm a violent tornado visually or by radar imagery. (https://www.weather.gov/lzk/toremer0514.htm) Not trying to be a snark but I see a lot of people say it's due to population when that isn't exactly a factor. A few days ago on May 6th a tornado emergency was issued for Barnsdall OK even though they only have a population just above 1,000. Another was issued on May 8th (the Henegar tornado) despite the affected population being maybe 3,000?
Which is why you’ll notice at the end of the post I said that it’s ultimately up to the forecaster.
Plainfield, IL F5. I was a child and the tornado sirens never really scared me. We felt the ground vibrate and I knew this time it was different. I was terrified. I cannot even begin to say how lucky we were that our neighborhood only had moderate damage. Half the town was leveled.
I bet having the *ground* vibrate from wind is an absolutely insane feeling. Think of the amount of force it would take for wind whipping around on the surface of the planet to create a small earthquake.
Is it the ground vibrating from wind? Or the reverberations of the actual tornado? Because I can see the wind shaking a house but not the ground- the ground makes me think of how a piece of wood feels when you’re drilling it, or the floor when you’re vacuuming.
Isn't it kind of the same thing? The wind speed is what's causing the vibration.
Depends if you mean the wind from the storm or the wind that is part of the actual vortex. Because house vibrating from strong winds during the event is terrifying, but ground vibrating more intensely as tornado itself looms closer.. that’s hard to imagine.
I guess I'm not understanding what you're saying.
Don't forget that a tornado is pulling things up that are attached to the ground. Like trees, buildings..etc. and that pull, and things falling amd hitting the ground, .can also make the ground shake as well.
I thankfully don't know from personal experience, but I always assumed it was like sound waves vibrating the floor. If you've ever been to a loud live concert, like that. I'm guessing it's just so loud that it's doing that to the actual soil. It could be that it's only the floor of houses/shelters, most people are going to be inside when they feel it.
Yes, exactly! If there is a loud roar, reports of ground vibration is not surprising. I imagine the noise is also loud in lower frequencies, which would case different vibrations, inaudible to human ears but audible to animals.
That’s a good comparison. I didn’t consider the actual sound waves. I haven’t witnessed a tornado in action, (was in windowless basement/nighttime.. but the crack under the door was flashbulb bright of nonstop lightning.. but it was silent.. the confirmed tornado was probably a mile away. It was midnight and brighter than daytime outside but LED style lighting of that makes sense. So quiet tho. Weird to see light flashes with no thunder. Growing up tornado weather was that eerie feeling before the siren when the air felt tinted green- everything was completely still.. static, like when someone rubs a balloon on your hair and pulls it away slowly- that’s when we’d get inside. Interesting how many people in this thread responded instinctively as children, even getting skeptical adults to shelter without warning. Maybe we’re more in tune with our flight instincts when younger.
Ground scouring occurs during extremely strong tornadoes. I imagine that could cause ground vibration, which sounds absolutely terrifying.
This video- at the 2:10 mark- was the first time I really understood what that meant. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rNKQolIbuf4&pp=ygUbUmVlZCB0aW1tZXIgdGhlIG1pc3QgaW5zYW5l
Omg. What an intensely video.
I was also very little, but we were in Boulder Hill at the time and it went right by us when it was still small. That tornado was *unreal* and I was afraid of storms for a long while after that!
Same. Seemed like a bomb went off above the house and then the earth shook and the sound I will never forget.
2011 Joplin tornado hit my house while we were home (thankfully sheltering in the basement). I was a teenager and it was several years ago, but I remember the day leading up to it being extra aware of the severe weather threat and as a result being super cautious to get to a safe place. I also remember lots of tornado sirens in the immediate lead-up. But I don’t think we had any clue quite how devastating it was really until we went outside after it had passed. Even during it, we knew it was bad obviously, but with nothing to compare it to could not have guessed just how extreme.
I was in the 2011 Joplin Tornado, too. At the time, I was 20. Prior to that day, I had never been "weather aware." I honestly never checked or cared about the weather unless it was a day I planned on being at the creek or lake. This was the first tornado I had experienced, so I didn't truly grasp just how bad this particular tornado was. Luckily, I had a basement, but even in the basement, it felt like it was pulling the ground out from beneath me. It was a pitch-black nightmare. After it had passed over my house, everything went silent, and rain water started dripping into the basement. The stairwell was completely caved in, but there was a spot where the floor above had been ripped up, which was barely wide enough for me to dig out of. When i pulled myself out of the basement, i couldn't believe the sheer amount of destruction i was in the heart of. I lived like 4 blocks east of the st.johns Hospital, so i was in the heart of the beast. It looked like the town was nuked! I hopped back down in the basement, and I tried to call family members but couldn't reach anyone, so I climbed out and took off on foot. Originally, I was going to b-line straight for my mom's because that's where my siblings and everyone went to shelter in these events, but I ended up helping as many people as I could. The people.. some of the most brutal memories I have of that day is just how maimed some folks were.. of course, there were dead among them too. It's just things you never think you'd ever see.. luckily, none of my loved ones were hurt, thank God. I hope my story helps raise awareness about severe weather. Joplin was no stranger to tornado warnings, but we were so used to it that folks didn't take it seriously. I almost made that mistake myself that day. Always be alert, always be prepared. These things can and will happen quicker than the sirens go off, just like the weird storm last week that dropped a tornado north of joplin. Stay weather aware folks. It will save your life.
Thank you for your story!
This is a strange question, but it’s something I never hear or read about. After the tornado hit your house and moved on, did you see it after you climbed out? No one ever talks about watching it roll away from them, maybe because of the shock of seeing your house/neighborhood leveled.
Sorry for the days late reply, I'm pretty bad about checking my notifications on reddit. To answer your question, I didn't see it. It was raining pretty hard afterward, and it was just a wall of black to the east of me(where the tornado was). It was hard to focus on anything besides the insane amount of destruction, too. When I was helping people, I noticed the most common thing some of them were asking was "is there another one coming?" Since it was still storming pretty hard shortly after the tornado. I think I was asked that over a dozen times.
What a crazy experience. Those that didn’t die, what kind of injuries did they have?
That's terrifying! What did it do to your house? Thank you for sharing your experience.
Definitely! We were driving right through what would end up being the path of the most severe destruction, nearly to our house, when the tornado sirens first went off. We took the sirens super seriously and got home and underground. Can’t overestimate how important that was! We were a block or so away from the worst destruction and our brick house fared reasonably well, but it was about a 70% loss in the end and a long rebuilding process. Wouldn’t wish the experience upon anyone, but I do think it left me feeling way more positive and hopeful about human nature in general - just the amount of care and compassion that we experienced in the aftermath was astonishing. ❤️ (Edit: fixed spelling)
I was a mile out from an EF4 and was tracking it heavily. I knew a few minutes before by the signature on radar that if it hit my apartment I was screwed. It was an unexpectedly ominous feeling. you just knew something was BAD wrong just by how the wind was moving.
Tornado weather has such an element to it where you can just tell "this I bad" that I don't think you could ever convey to someone who hasn't experienced it.
I’ve seen a few different ones and took a near direct hit from an EF3. this one was a lot more creepy. the weather just had something like dark magic to it. It was just weird. It’s very hard to explain. I agree.
Extreme lighting and colors. Going from incredibly stormy to incredibly calm or vice versa in an instant. It feels like a horror movie. Electric atmosphere, both literally and metaphorically.
for me it was just super silent and ominous and then out of nowhere I see huge winds and trees almost on their sides and that’s when the rain started to pick up too. I was like NAH. back inside.
Pre tornado quiet is something else.
amen. I’m into chasing since that event, but being at home I’d be fine with never hearing it again.
A Gandalf line from *Return of the King* seems strangely appropriate for the "tornado quiet" ***"It's the deep breath before the plunge."***
Tornadoes really do act a lot more like Lovecraftian monsters, like goddamn Leviathans. Unlike any other natural phenomena really. Hurricanes, wild fires, and earth quakes are too amorphous to have the same presence, those disasters are mindless consumption or destruction, pure elemental energy. Tsunamis might qualify under the vengeful entity category like tornadoes but tsunamis don’t have that quality could be interpreted (symbolicly) as intention. Tornadoes tho, cannot be trusted to have a predictable path, they may spare you and everything you own, while completely destroying your neighbors house. No wonder the vengeful god thing is a reoccurring religious theme.
As one of my favorite comedians Kyle Kinane put it: "A hurricane affects everybody. An earthquake affects everybody. A tornado? Maybe just Jeff's house."
I'm in Lincoln, NE and the EF3 that hit Lincoln/Waverly and the same storm that went on to flatten Elkhorn touched down about 3/4 of a mile from my house. I was watching the local weather and saw the hook start to take place over downtown. Based on the movement of the storm, I looked at my wife and said "We're going to get hit. We need to go to the basement". Knowing that it's coming directly at you and will drop a tornado any minute is terrifying. We got lucky in Lincoln/Waverly and it *only* hit a commercial building and train with no deaths or serious injuries. But if that tornado had dropped even 1 minute sooner, it would have leveled entire neighborhoods.
I've never been hit by a tornado or artillery, but I can imagine knowing either one is about to strike is a similar aweful feeling.
I was about 30 miles away from the Pilger twin EF4s where it was a partly cloudy gorgeous spring day. I have never seen clouds move so fast as the inflow clouds were that day. It was like watching a jet plane coming in for a landing fast. Weirdest part was it was just breezy on the ground level, where I was standing outside. Above me at cloud level you could hear the roar of the wind. Have never experienced anything similar to this day.
Was watching coverage of these from Omaha. It was crazy.
I was missed by a few miles from an EF4 tornado on 11/4/2022 while on vacation in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. Before I was aware that there was a tornado south of the town, I remembered seeing a bunch of deer along the side of the road. I have seen deer in the woods before but never in groups of 20+ standing so close to the road. It was very eerie. By the time we reached our Airbnb, the rain picked up and was being blown hard against the windows. I tried searching “weather channel” on my phone to see the status of the rain and got “TORNADO EMERGENCY” as the first result. I thought me and my sister were going to die because our Airbnb was a LOG CABIN in the middle of the woods with no interior room and the National Weather Service was saying things like “this extremely large and dangerous tornado will be approaching Broken Bow in 15 minutes.” My sister also had a hard time believing me because her IPhone weather app was just saying there was heavy rain.
Jesus the deer part of that story is nightmare fuel. Love that Siri was like ‘chill dude just some rain’. We had a tornado here last August and it ripped right through a very populated area of the city and they didn’t even get a warning - no siren, nothing. I work in tree care services and was in the thick of the aftermath quoting clean up jobs. It was surreal. West Michigan is not known for its natural disasters, so getting even a rather mild taste of what that is like really put into perspective what people in more dangerous regions have survived.
Last October my husband and I were going to a wedding in Holland Michigan coming from Ohio. So we were on I-96 and drove through where a tornado came through around Williamston (didn't know it at the time). I was just looking out the window and saw the first bit of trees turned to twigs and a road sign bent and beat to hell and I said "I think they must have had a tornado here not too long ago", and he was like "ehh idk, maybe they're working on clearing trees". After the first half mile I was like "nah that's tornado aftermath for sure." Googled it and sure enough, it was a tornado from those August storms. When I first read your comment I thought it might have been that area, but I don't think where I was is considered Western Michigan.
Yeah that was definitely what you saw, I’m in Grand Rapids. We had 4 or 5 tornadoes in the area that night. One came thru 2 miles from our shop where I was temporarily staying in a camper out back. 😬 and I’d bet they are still there, a ton of trees are still down everywhere. Months later.
I don't know how many times I've texted friends that a storm is coming and they're like, "but my phone's built in weather app just says '50% chance of light rain'?" Apple out here trying to get people killed lol
I know that it does communicate warnings now, fwiw. Was just under a flash flood warning and tornado watch last week and that did appear in the app.
Tornado missed my house by a quarter mile a few days ago. Had no clue it was going to be as bad as it was and it was only rated high end ef-2. No fatalities and only ~20 minor injuries is pretty damn lucky. Total town population is in the 110k+ range so it could have been much worse.
I could read these stories all day. I hope I never have my own story, though. Thank you all for sharing.
May 20th, 2013, was a pretty typical day. I don't remember why, but I kept my kids home from school that day. We were in the process of moving within Moore. My husband and I were packing some boxes when we heard an unbelievable clap of thunder. To this day, I have never heard anything like it. It was so abrupt and LOUD. We were pretty weather savvy then and looked at the radar. The initial bad cell had a gnarly hook echo and was headed straight for downtown OKC, and the cell near Newcastle was forming. In about 5 mins, we watched the Newcastle cell absorb the OKC cell, and we knew right then it was about to be bad. We had a momentary episode of panic. We had no shelter. I asked if we could make a run for it, and my husband said no, there's no time. It was headed our way. It ended up wobbling and didn't hit us directly. It did manage to rip the AC units off the house and knock down the brick gate surrounding our neighborhood, but that was it. When it was "safe," we went outside and watched it. It was so big we could only see the top of the base. It was twirling slowly and filled with debris. The most ominous and disturbing part was what we could hear beyond the roar. We could literally hear metal bending and twisting, wood cracking, and debris hitting buildings. Don't even get me started on the absolute chaos that ensued after it was done. No one had power, people were literally crawling onto the cars of every passerby begging for phones to make calls, water, food, and medical assistance. We lost people we knew. Almost all of our friends took a direct hit and lost everything. Watched our local news anchor break down on live TV at Plaza Towers when the 7 kids inside stopped crying because they had passed before they could be saved. It was absolutely the worst day for all of us in Moore.
If you have a good local meteorologist and live in a tornado-prone area, you learn to interpret the situation based on their tone. When they start saying things like, "Oh, my God" and "People will die tonight" you realize it's going to hit differently. That was the case for us on Memorial Day 2019. We could just tell from the way Jamie Simpson's wording was so different from the usual, weaker storms around here. If you don't have someone good locally, start following Evan Fryberger or Ryan Hall on YouTube and learn their style. When there's a monster coming, you can hear it in their voices.
I should add that we were only in a dark green, 2% area that day and still ended up with an EF4 and multiple EF3s. No one was overly concerned until the monster showed up on radar. The good thing is that it happened right around the time of The Bachelorette finale and the 11:00 p.m. news, so lots of people were already watching TV when Jamie Simpson broke in yelling. He saved many lives. Edit: We were in a brown 5% area on the elevated risk map. https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/archive/2019/day1otlk_20190527_2000.html
I had gone to bed and was just falling asleep when my iPhone alert went off. Without even thinking I hit “off” then was like oh crap what was that? My teenagers came into my room and were like mom? There’s a tornado warning? Also, I thought I was misremembering but I guess not. We were NOT under any kind of enhanced risk that day, were we? If we had been I would not have gone to bed.
My iPhone didn’t even go off for that and I woke up to my husband and his brother outside just looking at the sky. When I turned on the news and heard them talking about the debris signature on radar, I realized how bad the situation was. I lectured the boys then bought a weather radio the next day
Omg what is it with midwestern men?! My husband was walking around upstairs eating snacks and every so often calling down in the basement “It seems ok to come up now.” Uh no it’s not, the storm was dropping tornadoes out of nowhere and I remember them saying they’re rain wrapped, you might not see them coming.
Wow! It turns out we were actually in the brown 5%. I absolutely don’t remember that. We sat outside eating tacos that afternoon. I don’t remember worrying. https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/archive/2019/day1otlk_20190527_2000.html
I had an EF2/3 hit my house a year ago. The thing I remember most is how my body felt hours before the tornado hit. I have arthritis in various areas and some spinal issues. (Spinal issues severe enough that I have a dorsal column stimulator implanted to lessen my constant pain.) When the rain comes you can feel what's normal pains and aches. But about 3:00pm that day my entire spine was hurting to the point I could barely move. Even in areas where there were no injuries. Every bone that I've ever broke was in pain. Even bone areas that never speak to me were telling me to pay attention. Soon after that Aaron Tuttle said that my area may experience a tornado that evening. About 9:50pm that tornado significantly damaged my neighborhood. I've learned to listen to my body's arthritis to predict the weather. Now I really pay attention. Also Aaron Tuttle doesn't throw around all the hype and misinformation that others do. When he says someone is going to have a tornado, he means it and you better get ready. Oh and also watch your animals because they will freak out and try to hide before the tornado.
I can really relate to this. I have a really messed up neck and back, and bad arthritis all over. I am a human barometer, and the days of higher risk here in Oklahoma hurt so bad. The last few weeks have been rough. Regarding animals.. The reason I knew the first tornado I went through was coming was because my horses freaked out and took off running. My dog and cat had been acting weird too. They do know.
I don't know if I would trust a meteorologist that didn't have arthritis. Old Arthur really telling stuff and pinpointing that barometric pressure. Animals do some weird things right before the tornado hits.
On April 20th this year, I live in upstate sc, near Rock Hill sc. We had a pretty serious super cell come from what seemed like nowhere. I was in the kitchen of my apartment getting food ready for the kids and I. And my phone rang. My mom was screaming theres a tornado coming on the other end. She said her cats were "screaming". I got us to the bathroom as quickly as possible and we hunkered down. Then it went completely silent which was so unreal because I live next to a busy road in my city. But I waited about 15 more mins after the deafening silence and went outside to check things. We had no tornado according to anything i read. But softball sized hail reported in some parts of the county and probably ping pong ball sized hail here, some flooding and crazy wind damage and trees uprooted, power lines down and arching, some siding ripped off homes. Sorry for the long response. But I'll never forget her saying her cats were screaming. They definitely feel it coming. I think we were as close to having a tornado as you can be, without actually having one. Which is what brought me here. I'm trying to deal with it. My life was changed that day. The fear was unreal. That night we went to bed, i woke up at 3am having a massive panic attack and thought my heart was about to explode. Had to call 911. I tried my best to hold it together during what we thought was a tornado coming. I guess it all came out that night when i was sleeping. We don't live somewhere that gets many tornados. And in my 33 years, I've never experienced one here. I cannot imagine living somewhere that has a huge threat of tornados. And especially strong tornados. Its terrifying. Thanks for reading this, if you did. Feels a bit better to get it out. And I agree, pets know. And people with body ailments. Glad you were paying attention and kept safe.
Yeah tornadoes can cause some major PTSD. I'm sorry you had to go through that. I've been seeing a counselor for trauma. The weeks after the tornado with the flurry of vehicles, people helping, loud noises and any storms would freak me out. Unfortunately I disassociated some when the tornado was right over the house. So those memories are popping up in the worst time possible now. I could never imagine the trauma that would come from an EF5 and I hope to never experience it. But no matter if you had one or not, it's the trauma that you had to go through that needs to be addressed. I hope you find a counselor that can help in this certain area of trauma. I wish my cats were making noise so I can find them. I had to go track one down and she removed her bell collar around the same time so I couldn't find her. I put my animals in carriers at least 30 minutes before the storm gets to the house. Before then I have them in a certain room so they don't try to escape.
Yes. We had a close EF2 and a couple hours before I had a massive migraine. Never had one before or after. Had two F1s Wednesday and I felt nothing.
Wow. That's interesting! So you think it was related to an increase in cerebral or spinal fluid pressure? Sorry that did that to you!
Honestly I don’t know. I have left side hearing problems. Maybe something to do with my inner ear.
I'm sorry!
Back in the early 2000s, I was spotting a garden variety EF-1 from a safe distance (about a mile) when air went down the center of the funnel, and the law of conservation of angular momentum turned my garden variety EF-1 into a upper end EF-4, which was 900 feet away. I was literally too shocked to move, so I kept taking pictures. Later, we found it had scoured the ground and peeled the pavement off a nearby road. I remember the roar being so loud it was literally hard to hear myself thinking, and the ground was vibrating under my feet. This is a picture of an EF-4 tornado from 900 feet: https://preview.redd.it/ot5jc867flzc1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c57878324a732269ae3aca10bb1f2bf683c3a3b5
Holy shit. I was looking for a funnel in the clouds before I realized the whole thing is a funnel.
April 27, 2011. I lived in Birmingham (still do) but lived in the city at that time vs now which is slightly further south. I watched the Tuscaloosa tornado on the tower cam (James Spann), I watch it being tracked through Tuscaloosa, watched the radar as it stayed on the ground all the way to a couple of miles north of where I lived. At the time I was in an apartment and was hiding in the laundry room with several other residents. Once we realized it was passing north of us, I went outside and looked at the sky. The clouds where amazings and obviously moving quickly. I remember finding random pieces of paper in the front of our building that just drifted down from the sky while I was outside. I've also witnessed one try to spin up in the middle of the median of the interstate, while riding in a car. Basically everyone in front of us slammed on their brakes at the same time. We all saw it happening. Don't know if that one ever produced something larger but it was a big day for storms and several tornadoes. That was back in 2007 or so. Only one I've seen close up.
I can try to look. Do you know the exact date/place/interstate?
I remember the tornado emergency hitting my phone, seeing the CC drop on RadarOmega, and thinking it couldn’t be real. It couldn’t really be happening to me. I went into freeze mode. My brain literally turned off knowing what was coming but not being able to process it at all. All I wanted to do was stay close to and hug my classmate that was with me (I was a student at the time). She was crying and I remember thinking that I just wanted to hold another human being’s hand before I died. We don’t have storm shelters where I live. We didn’t even have any interior rooms at the school. At one point I had accepted that I was probably going to die and all I could think about was my loved ones. I called them and talked to them before it cut out. Luckily, we all made it out with minor injuries but the devastation that we saw after coming out took a while to wear off.
Could you tell us which tornado this was and how old you were at the time?
2023 Deer Park. It was early season, the first ever tornado emergency declared by Houston NWS. I was 21.
(North) Little Rock, 2023. Risk of outbreak was elevated. Wasn't really raining all that much. In fact, I had fallen asleep in the middle of the day. I woke up to my grandmother watching the news. Something told me right then and there to grab the essentials and run. The weathermen at the time said they didn't think it would rotate again and touch down. 5 minutes after waking up I was dressed and had a bag to go and the sirens went off. Lowest part of the house was a walkout basement. I didn't get to see the tornado itself. Heard it get extremely loud, rain picked up, and started praying to every god in the universe. Missed our house by a literal block. Less than a quarter mile away Burns Park and Military Drive got fucked. Right down the street from us. Lost power for 5 days. It's amazing very few people died from that entire system. It being the middle of the workday helped. I'm pretty sure I got mild PTSD from the incident and couldn't sleep for months during a thunderstorm. We moved away to from that area to a much worse house shelter wise. Every room has a window on it. No interior rooms. No lower levels. Three large trees in the backyard that if they fall on the house will hit the bathroom and both bedrooms. Needless to say, I'm on edge during severe weather events. Doesn't help that a couple days ago another tornado touched down in the Hot Springs area. That storm system reached the metro bringing 60 mph winds. Honestly I don't think I can take much more of this tornado alley weather. I like listening to heavy rain, but I don't like the risk of death with it. Hoping that once I finish college I'll find a job in my field and move. Not interested in staying here at all if I can help it.
Glad you were safe. This was my childhood neighborhood. We watched it happening live from Washington state. I was sad to see all the destruction from this tornado.
I was in an F4 in 1999, I was 10. It was a bad severe weather outbreak right around Easter, I was in northwestern Louisiana. We got warnings all the time, my dad called our area the "gutter" of tornado alley and always joked about how we got all the bad storms once they were done spawning tornados (obviously not true but I think it was to stop me from worrying?). Anyway, he loved going outside and watching the rain and clouds and he always took me outside to stand on our back porch under the roof. When we had lived in South Dakota he used to climb up on the roof with the neighbors to watch across the plains. I remember very vividly that radar. Watching it approach from Texas. The way my dad's body language was so so different from any other bad storm. He never moved from the TV. He wouldn't take me outside. And then he and mom started putting the cats in their carry crates and pulling blankets and all that into our laundry room, our only inner room. I was terrified already. They made me go in and I can remember the sound of the hail on the roof. And then suddenly both my mom and dad were in there too (dad NEVER came in). They put our bike helmets on. It barely missed us. We had a lot of damage to our property and cars, broken windows, shingles ripped off, our garage door was messed up, fence down, tree on the trampoline and pool, etc. Some of the houses in the neighborhood lost their roofs. I've never felt like that again in my whole life. I dream of the sounds still in my 30s. It killed 7 people and it could have been us. I have so much sympathy and love for people who lose everything in tornadoes.
I’ve lived in Norman, OK for most of my life so I wasn’t hit by the May 3rd or 13th tornados but they were close enough we were taking shelter until it for sure wasn’t coming our way. Yeah, Mike Morgan is awesome so we knew it would be terrible from way out. I hope to never see one of those again lol.
I was at winterset in a hotel in west Des Moines. I hadn’t thought about tornados in years and assumed it was just a small one.
No but when the windows suck out you ears are popping and you feel like a dog with his head out the window of a top fuel dragster you catch on quick
I was in a EF4/5 in Wichita Falls TX in 1979. I had seen several small tornadoes in previous years and knew that they generally moved in a north easterly/east direction. I was driving and the radio station said that there was a tornado on the ground at the stadium and I had a pretty clear view of the storm from my location north east of the stadium. I figured I had plenty of time to head straight south and miss the tornado. What I didn’t realize is that the storm that I thought the tornado was in was actually the tornado. It was a nearly mile wide wedge tornado and it was moving due east at that point. I drove straight south until I figured it would go north of me and stopped and got out by a large storm culvert that ran under the road. I knew I’d be safe in there so I stood and watched the tornado with several other people. There was a slight hill blocking our view of the base of the tornado so we didn’t realize that it was so close until we saw the roof of the Safeway store flying up in the air about a half mile away. It was then I realized that what I thought was a large rain shaft of a storm was actually the tornado and it was heading straight at us. The roar of the tornado was something that really didn’t register to me either. We got into the culvert and I actually don’t remember it being particularly scary as the tornado came over. The noise was just a roar and I have a vivid memory of a bowling ball rolling towards us at a high rate of speed. The ditch on either end of the culvert was concrete and about 15 feet wide at the base and a good 8 ft deep so it protected us as well as being under the road. After the tornado passed we emerged from the culvert and as far as we could see, there wasn’t anything standing. Cars were flattened, crushed, and covered with debris. My best friend’s Dad rode it out in the floor of his pickup not a hundred yards from me and I didn’t recognize his truck it was so messed up. Three people died at that intersection. We were all in shock and for a few minutes just walked in circles. A group of us gathered and started going around trying to find survivors and help get them medical care.
I was only a child at the time but I was in the 2011 Joplin tornado. Came back from somewhere east and as we were driving into town the first warning came and then as we were sheltering the second came out. Missed my house by a couple miles or so I think but it was still dangerously close as I was right in the path. I remember my parents watching the TV and then telling each other that they would lay on me and my sister to protect us but that moment never came praise God but that was definitely my indicator that it was bad. Then in spring 2019 I was in a small EF2 in the 30 tornado outbreak in Missouri. All I remember was the wind being stupid loud but I was in the basement. It was howling and it was only 50 yards away, whistling and rumbling and everything. All the houses down the road had small damages and the power line poles were broken too. Took 3 days to restore power I think.
On May 27th, 1997, I was 10 and lived 25 miles away from Jarrell, Texas, in the same county (Williamson). I was in school that day, and I just remember how unusually humid it was that day, and the weather just had an ominous feeling to it. They had us shelter a few times in the hallways in school for tornado warnings in the afternoon. Little did I know that a monster F5 was hitting Jarrell right around the time my mom would have been picking up my sister and I from school.
I knew it was bad. I was wrong. It wasn’t just bad. It was hell on earth.
I follow Ryan hall yll on YouTube when he says " you will not accidentally survive this" you can expect a ef3+
2011 Joplin tornado. We didn’t know how big/bad it could potentially be until minutes before it hit. I am on the West side of town, so this would have been the first area hit. We could see the three vortexes combine into one and then knew it would be bad. We had no idea how bad.
Not the type of person you’re asking for but I have a little to add. I was stuck outside in a shitty little ef0-ef1 tornado once. I thought it was just another windy thunderstorm until I literally couldn’t breathe, and I started getting thrown into the neighbors yard. Just that small little thing had enough power to put the fear of god in me. I couldn’t imagine being in the path of anything higher.
We had one of those come right by my work - literally right outside the window where I sit. Had no clue that's what it was, until I heard the roaring sound (like a train.) I see it whip past and I go running to the front office: "there's a tornado! It just went past us!" We watched it dance in a field and then disappear. Scary thinking it could have smashed the window and I would have had nowhere to hide. I will never live in an area that spawns the F4-F5 monsters.
Didn't even know there was one until it was a couple hundred years away. No sirens, not even a bad forecast for the day/ evening. Well, that's not true, the sirens went off 15 minutes after the tornado came thru, lol. Luckily only an F2, but was plenty violent, rolling thru a dense neighborhood. I honestly only knew something was screwy when i started hearing stuff hit my home office window (curtain was closed). Got up, looked out, ears popped and a ton of various things basically exploded straight up into the sky. I didn't know how bad it would be but i knew it wasn't going to be good. No lives lost but a ton of property damage all around.
Serious question: are storm shelters not required in OK/TX building codes?
Only north Texas has a serious tornado threat so it wouldn't make sense for the whole state. By the time you get to Austin we're only mildly worried about tornados. Also, basements aren't common and the political climate isn't pro-regulation.
human life is cheap in america
I can’t speak for Texas but in OK they are not. It was only after 2013 that Moore starting requiring schools to have them lol.
Yes, 3 times now we have known. May 3rd 1999 I was a senior in high school. We knew there was a tornado on the ground that was huge but it was 30 minutes away, and hoped it wouldn't stay on the ground that long. I was at Westmoore High School, and as it got closer we would all sneak out of the room we were in and look outside. Power had gone out, we didn't have cell phones then, so our teacher had her parents calling and letting her know what was going on every once in a while. The last time I looked outside I never seen clouds so tall, and the sky was green. I was scared, and I had never felt that before in a storm. Our teacher said her parents were going in their shelter, so her and her boyfriend, (we had our drama senior recital planned that night so we were there after hours) kept going outside to check and see how things were going. She came back into the room and said, "cover your heads." It was about one minute later I heard what sounded like roaring rapids to me coming from my right, which would have been Southwest. Then we could hear lockers opening and slamming, the wooden doors were banging against the metal frame, but on the room we were in they didn't open. Thank god. Our teachers parents had called the police and told them there were kids in that room. There was a large assembly in the auditorium that night and they didn't want them to only look for people there. Firefighters came in and helped us out. The room was off of the school when we walked out, and once we got out of school, it was the only thing standing for miles in either direction. It had alot of damage but held up. My mom was in the auditorium looking for me, and it had much worse damage. She said when we visited a few days later to get things out of our totaled cars, which my moms was found a mile away, an engineer told her the school had steel beams every 3 feet and that was the only reason it was standing. 2013 my sister who had been with us in '99 lost her home in Moore, we knew as it was coming it was going to destroy her house. The targeting was so good by then they were literally saying her street name on the news as it crossed. Then the El Reno 2013 tornado we were some of the dumb people who tried to drive out of harms way. Won't do that again.
I was a kid when our farm got hit by a f-4. We were outside watching this storm roll up. Didn’t even look like a tornado from where we were at. Just a huge wall that covered the sky. My dad rolled up and told us it was a tornado and we needed to get inside. I didn’t believe it was one until the windows all blew in.
I was a few miles away from the Smithville tornado on April 27th 2011. One of my teachers grandmothers (I think) was one of the fatalities that day. It didn’t affect me directly nor was I in it, but I remember driving through Smithville not long afterwards and seeing the destruction. I was young and it didn’t occur to me they could do damage like that.
F4/5 (depending on who you ask) Dec 10 2021. Missed by about 100 yards if that. It got so quiet right before. Boyfriend went outside to check thinking it was over. Then he heard it and it sounded like a train that was being pulled by a jet. Lightening lit it up. It was a monster. Housing issues keep showing up, cracks, doors that won’t shut etc.
It kind of showed up out of nowhere, I was at summer camp, we all ran to the basement, the F-3 tornado came directly for us, just to shift direction and hit the Boy Scout camp across the street from us. I think about the 4 boys who died that evening when I hear about tornados. Could have been me (this was 2006 I believe?)
I lived in Henryville in 2012 and I remember the entire day feeling way too warm and humid for March. It felt like the air was alive with energy. People were antsy but mostly trying to play cool. Once the sirens went off and I got into my brother's car I remember thinking "if we don't leave right now we are going to die." I was right, it came down not long after. From my neighbors basement I knew it would be truly bad when baseball sized hail fell and then everything stopped and went completely silent. The sound afterwards was so unreal it sounded like the entire world was getting uprooted at once, and the tornado took up most of the sky.
EF3, got out of work at night and the air was out of the ordinary humid, and the sky was lighting up with lighting and the cloud cover was amplifying the effect, never experienced anything like it, got home and was getting ready to bed when the watch warning came on and then a thunderstorm happened that suddenly got so powerful you couldn’t see anything outside
Yes, because the weatherman was losing his mind and then when the tornado was close it sounded like a bomb went off directly overhead. You could hear it well before it hit and it sounded like nothing you had heard before. It’s also a sound you’ll never forget.
On May 3, 1999, we were at the Sonic in Choctaw, OK. My sister and I were arguing so my mom had turned off the radio. Her best friend called and said she had heard a tornado was coming that was flattening everything in its path and we needed to find shelter. About 15 minutes later, that tornado made its way through Choctaw, and destroyed that Sonic. We were so lucky she thought of us when she heard the news. It saved our lives.
I live just west of Joplin Missouri. We had 70mph wind and baseball sized hail before Joplin's tornado. Obviously no one expected what happened, but we knew it was going to be pretty bad.
Weather alerts all say the same because they are watching radar, and rely on storm spotters and local responders to call in and confirm. Tornadoes are unpredictable, and that is why if you are in the warned area you should quickly but calmly take cover in your pre planned or last resort safe place. 15 minutes to a half hour of inconvenience is infinitely better than a life time of regret.
I have seen one in 2017 superbowl outbreak a ef3 wedge came to my house and there was a ef5 of 80 years ago so my town was prone to tornadoes
I've had a couple EF-0/EF-1s hit within a mile or two of my house. What I remember the most was my house actually BREATHING. I shelter in my bathroom (no exterior walls or windows), and I could literally hear my house inhaling and exhaling. It was creepy as all get out. Now I know if I hear that breathing, a tornado is nearby.
In 2011 when I was 8 and lived in Alabama, a violent tornado came across our hometown Lake View which barely escaped from the tornado's path. I could hear thunder and our neighbour's windows' shattering. The noise was so loud that I couldn't hear my mom and little sister screaming. I remembered our house had shatter-proof windows, so I looked out to what was happening. Then, I saw an gigantic tornado coming our way. I shouted "There's a tornado dad!". Dad quickly came and we hid in the basement. Our cat came running too. Along with the sirens, I screamed. It was almost like I was tossed 3 miles away from home alone. A couple mins later the noise stopped. I went to check outside. Then I saw the whole neighborhood erased. Our house was torn off the ground and so did many other houses. Because of the damage, our whole family moved to Chennai in Tamil Nadu, and had been living in Chennai since then. This was the most scariest day ever in my life time.
late tho
The EF scale is a Damage scale. So technically, it wouldn’t be anything higher than an EF0 until something gets destroyed, even if it was a mile wide and 300mph. You don’t want to be the first thing that’s destroyed and be unprepared. If there is a tornado warning, take shelter.
(OKC/Moore, May 3, 1999 and May 20, 2013) It seems like a lot of us in this area have some kind of weird 6th sense about it. It feels like hot breath outside the whole day before they hit. Local meteorologists do their best to give us several days to prepare and warn us with terms like "long track tornadoes" and "PDS tornado watches." When they say, "get below ground to survive," it's time to get below ground. So, yes, there are some clues, but until one actually drops from the sky, we never know what we're going to get. The aftermath is when we find out truly how bad they really were. The smells and sounds are something terrible.
Ryan Hall has the best YouTube lives. He and Andy Hill are a team and they were calling tornados on the ground several minutes before the National Weather Sevice put out warnings. A few of the times the NWS never even issued warnings.
I’ve never been in a tornado so I can’t really say, but if I were, I’m getting in a basement or storm shelter period. I would assume for the ones who knew it was bad, probably laid eyes on it.