Tornado Stories

kw: tornadoes, personal experiences

I've been reading a book about tornadoes and tornado chasing. I'll review it soon. It reminded me of experiences going way, way back.

I first heard a tornado story from my grandmother. Her family lived in Wichita, Kansas when she was young. One sunny day, a storm blew up rather suddenly. The young girl, exploring in a hidden corner of the yard, didn't respond to being called right away. A hard wind prompted her to go around to the front of the house, trying to find people—everyone had vanished. She sat on the porch, looked across the street, and saw a neighbor's house shatter apart. The tornado lifted at that moment, and roared right above her. She looked up inside the funnel. She told me it was blue inside, rather bright against the dark sky.

I've heard from others that tornadoes that arrive in dry weather have a lot of lightning with them, including inside the funnel. Some tornadoes are visible after dark for that reason. I have only seen tornadoes in moist or rainy conditions.

As a child, growing up in the arid Southwest, I often saw dust devils. We kids would pretend they were mighty funnel clouds, and imagine being carried away like Dorothy, to Oz. On a few occasions I ran right into one of them. Once it was strong enough to give me a spin and sit me down. I never tried running into one that was carrying a few tumbleweeds, though!

I first saw (nearly) the real thing when I was in High School. I was working at a resort on Lake Erie. One afternoon a big storm protruded a wall cloud, then, one after another, seven waterspouts formed over the lake, spun ashore, and broke up. They were about half a mile away, no more than fifty feet across just above the water line.

I went to graduate school in Rapid City, South Dakota. We lived East of town. People boasted that the city had never had a tornado within city limits. You could see, though, on aerial photos (I was a Geology student) several scars of tornadoes that had knocked over swathes of trees in the Black Hills. One day, the boast became outdated. A huge storm system blew up, with wind of all kinds, but little rain. I looked out my back door and saw a funnel cloud forming, several miles away. I ran outside to photograph it. About then, a blast of wind blew me right back through the open door, into the house. It was the inflow from a nearby tornado. From the front door, we watched a tornado tear its way across a sorghum field, hoovering up about a third of my neighbor's crop. It was later determined that four tornadoes passed through the city that day.

Many years later, living in Oklahoma, I nearly drove into one. Oklahoma twisters tend to be rain-wrapped. Anywhere within a half mile of them, you can't see them. I was at a friend's house, about 5 pm. My wife called to say the tornado siren had gone off (I could hear it over the phone), and would I come home Right Now! Foolishly, I agreed...there was no siren howling near where I was. The traffic lights were all out, so I figured it had already passed on. I found out later, the town power came from the West, and the wires went down ten minutes before the storm arrived. I remember turning North onto Perkins, the main street toward home. It began raining buckets, and blowing hard. Within seconds there was surf in the middle of the street. When it began to hail, I whipped into a parking lot and drove to the lee side of a warehouse market. I'd been trying to find a radio station that was working. Just as gravel from the building's roof began falling on my car, I got a Tulsa station. I heard, "...we have it on radar. It is at the intersection of Perkins and McElroy." I though, "That's where I am!" A minute or two later, the wind began to drop. Within ten minutes the sky was blue, except in the East, where the storm was receding. I had to go around the rest of Perkins Avenue, because there were wires lying in the street. The power poles had all been broken off about 15 feet above the ground, and the upper floor of a 2-storey apartment building, right across the street from my shelter, had been removed. It seems the tornado wasn't quite on the ground when it went by me, about 100 yards away.

Five years later, we took a driving vacation through Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and South Dakota. On the road going West toward Goodland, Kansas, we saw an isolated storm get organized about twenty miles further on. Goodland was another twenty miles beyond that. It was similar to the Ohio experience, but not waterspouts. There were five tornadoes in all, and for several minutes at a time there would be three on the ground, apparently following the same track. About the time the one in front broke up, another would form at the rear. They looked like small tornadoes, perhaps F0; I don't think they were as big as F1. See The Fujita Scale of Tornado Intensity. Regardless, I slowed down, not wanting to get there too soon! After about fifteen minutes, the show was over and the storm broke up. Another fifteen minutes, and we drove by, seeing only a few "drag marks" on the ground showing where the funnels had crossed the highway.
The following year, we moved to the East Coast, where tornadoes are not impossible, but very scarce. Funny, though, we liked Oklahoma a lot, and talk about returning when I retire.