I hate them.
Not the cool kind, with lots of lightning that you can watch from an open window, enjoying the cool breezes and sounds of rumbling thunder.
I mean the kind that are poised to roll over my hometown, bringing softball sized hail and f5 tornados.
I hate them.
K… I’ve never witnessed an F5… but I love thunderstorms… sorry… I guess it’s a POV thing…
I love thunderstorms, but the wind scares the dickens out of me. Give me a nice safe earthquake instead 
I am having a devil of a time getting used to the windstorms. Not having grown up in Tornado Alley, any little breezed just about gets my heart pounding.
I’ve been in 3 tornados, seen dozens, and have been in about 13 hurricanes and tropical storms. Also 2 major earthquakes.
There’s nothing quite like the dread of a tornado bearing down on you. It’s the unpredictability coupled with the area wide warnings that cause this, imho.
Hurricanes tend to move slowly, with the predictions getting more and more accurate. Earthquakes are full of terror, true, but there is no advanced warnings to build up the dread. They happen and are gone.
Tornados, tho… The news guys can now tell you that the winds are 318mph at Sw119th and I-35, but they can’t tell you it won’t turn north at Choctaw Rd, thus misssing you but destroying your workplace. Yeah, give me hours of unpredictable dread, yeay! Still, I’d rather know exactly where it is as opposed to the old way.
I love thunderstorms, except when it’s really hot and muggy, and it’s roasting inside, and then the power goes out. No AC, no fans. Yuck.
My mother once watched a tornado take off a neighbor’s garage roof (behind their house), but didn’t touch her own house when she was a kid.
Kentucky isn’t quite the big target that Kansas is, but we’ve had more than our share of big scary storms lately, imo. I’ve never been too enamoured of the nasty, windy kinda storms anyway, and, now that I have my own kids to worry about, these kinds of storms scare the crap outta me. Perhaps it’s because there’s a big ol’ worry gene that gets passed around in my family, but the worrying is something that folks didn’t tell me was such a huge part of being a parent. Geez, I worry enough about the boring day to day kinds of things, I don’t need to worry about a freakin’ F5 tornado knocking my house down and killing someone.
Ugh.
I’ve been through an F4… when I was 4 or so… All I really remember is being out with Grandma and mom getting ice cream and Grandma pointing out a funnel cloud, then we went home and got the sleeping bags, my teddy, the radio and my bird in his cage and went downstairs. The next day we went on a drive to see the damage in the country and I remember everything everywhere, lots of wood and destruction.
Hope things are okay there FilmGeek
My family and I underwent a tornado while boating on Lake of the Woods in northwestern Ontario when I was a kid. We were in a big regatta with a bunch of other boats. It blew up at night. I remember my mom and dad on deck screaming at each other over the wind, while I comforted my little brother below.
We ended up with the neighbours’ bowsprit through our porthole, and our dinghy in their cockpit (I’m trying to think of a way for that sentence not to sound dirty, but not coming up with much). It could have been worse: another family’s boat was picked right up out of the water and dropped on the shore, and a few people were killed in a nearby cottage.
Baaaaaaaaaka! That was me. :smack:
Ugh, tell me about it. We just got done last week with those horrid storms that hit North Texas (I’m in between Dallas and Fort Worth), and caused the worst power outages in TXU’s (the power company, not the college) 100-year history.
Over 500,000 people were without power, and they had to call in electricity crews from 10 different states to help get it back on. The storms were Tuesday and Wednesday and there were still almost 100,000 people without power by the weekend. My future in-laws didn’t get theirs back till Sunday afternoon. We had some really bad power surges, but didn’t lose power in my neighborhood.
Which is just as well, really…I think if I had to go without Internet access for almost a week at home, I’d go barking mad.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5132065/
I’ve been in a tornado, a hurricane, and an earthquake (well, tremor, really, but considering I was in Chicago at the time, and had no idea we even had a fault line close :eek: ). There’s nothing scarier than tornado weather to me. Nothing.
The sky goes that eerie grey-green and gets silent, I start freaking out and round my cats up and herd em into the bathroom.
I’m in Fort Worth, and yeah, there were LOTS of people sweating here last week. The power in my house went out for about 10 hours overnight. It’s very hard to sleep when one is sweating a pint every half hour. At that, we were luckier than some people, who went without power for days.
The worst part, of course, was the fact that the internet company we subscribe to lost power, and couldn’t get their system working again until most of Fort Worth had had its power restored. I was without an internet connection from Tuesday evening until Friday morning! I was having some pretty severe withdrawal symptoms, and so was my daughter. I fought it, though, by digging out some old PC and PlayStation games.
My husband was VERY happy when my daughter and I could get online again. He was getting pretty darned jumpy, what with both of us going around growling and snarling.
<3 my SBC Yahoo DSL, we didn’t lose our DSL at all.
I haven’t been in, or seen, a tornado. But I have been in any number of storms that could have produced one. I am petrified of bad storms, because I am all too good at imagining Death bearing down on me. Especially at night, when you can’t see a damn thing!
Earthquakes aren’t much fun (I was in LA in 1994) – in fact, Northridge was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced – but at least there wasn’t a horrible storm going on, and if it had happened during the day, I wouldn’t have seen it coming to get me.
I think I will just barely take earthquakes over tornadoes. I haven’t been in any hurricanes, but I know I’ll take an earthquake over one of THOSE babies any day!
Don’t apologize, if6was9. I love thunderstorms too. Just not the ones that bring the threat of death.
The ones last night were super anticlimatic.
80mph winds were fun. The barbecue grill is sitting in my foyer right now, because the neighbors’ grill was picked up and moved 10 feet by the wind, slamming it into the side of the house.
The second one that rolled through was just a thunderstorm, no dangerous winds or tornadic activity. Sigh.
We had some nasty t-storms roll through our area last night. No huge hail or tornadoes, luckily, but we had a lightning strike very close by that knocked out our TV and DVD player–both of which were plugged into a surge suppressor, but apparently the spike was a very large one–and my DSL adapter. The modem is fine, so UncleBill is still online, but I have to get by with dialup for the next couple days. Bummer. We’re keeping our fingers crossed our renter’s insurance will cover replacements. Rar.
Since I live near Chicago, I don’t have to deal with earthquakes or tropical storms, but since I live in the suburbs, we do get tornados. Nasty little buggers, and one time when I was 10, I was home alone during an F4 (I think). Scared the shit out of me.
Crawl Space oh Crawl Space how I love thee,
Cemented in the ground, safe, are we!
man that was corny…shakes head
We just had a roll of thunder as I opened this thread.
I s’pose I should go see if the dog is now trying to hide behind the toilet. Big scary thunderstorms indeed.
Nothing personal, but please stay the hell away from my end of the country.
Oh, I agree. Especially since the building I live in has no nearby shelter, I live on the 2nd floor, and it’s a highly unsturdy structure, I really dread those storms.
Psst, you might want to read my previous post. 
I was living in the Chicago suburbs growing up in the 80’s, and quite vividly remember the tremor we felt, that occurred along the New Madrid fault line, which runs into the very very tip of IL. (It’s also considered the most active fault line in the US, believe it or not).
http://www.cusec.org/S_zones/NMSZ/nmsz_home.htm
http://www.glaciermedicaled.com/Earthquake_html/EQ_US/EQ_us8.html
http://www.disasterrelief.org/Disasters/980422quakes/
It was just a tad over 4 on the Richter scale, as I recall, but I very vividly remember our house shaking some, in Buffalo Grove (about 45ish minutes NW of Chicago)