You were living in Belmond, or that’s where it hit? The one I went through was in Cedar Rapids, which is about 80 miles from Belmond. That would have been somewhere between '66 and '69.
Yeah, nothing beats having whole your town disappear (and a few people killed) like that cool tornado in Kansas a couple of weeks ago. Or a really cool one like hit Moore, OK a few years ago. 36 dead and $1.1 billion lost there.
We get tornados here all the time, I guess that’s why I’m jaded to their coolness. Had one in’95 that made all the tornado shows, still see it being played on TV. I worked a couple hundred yards from where it started, got a really good view of an F4 that day. Only $30 million damage from that one.
Here (Concord, Mass.) the skies got a bit clearer after the storm passed. Now it is overcast and rainy again.
I’d always wanted to see a tornado. Then a few years ago we had that summer when it seemed that there was a tornado every week in the Mid-West. After seeing countless stories of families losing everything, I decided that this was one thing I could cross off my wish list. Greensburg, Kansas only reinforced that thought for me.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to downplay their awefulness. They’re some scary things.
The day after my Cedar Rapids one, my dad went up in his friend’s plane to survey the damage. He took photos. It looked as if God’s Finger had drawn a crooked path through a residential neighborhood. Some houses were untouched, and right next door – matchsticks.
To be honest, they are extremely cool when they are out in the middle of no place (we have a lot of that). You can see the big clouds from miles away and it’s pretty easy to drive out and see a tornado from a distance.
Last year we didn’t have hardly any, this year we had fatal tornados nearby one week, a foot of snow the next week, and then back to tornados. There has been quite a bit of rural damage so far this year, some of it less than 10 miles from my side of town.
So yeah, tornado spotting/chasing is pretty easy, but about every 10~15 years or so they hit town and tear the crap out of things. '71, '82, '95, that I can remember, we are about due again I guess.
Even though the '95 tornado was more “famous”, the '82 was much larger. There is a large grain elevator about 2 miles east of my house. I was up on the roof taking pics of the tornado, farther on east of the grain elevator, it looked like it was right in town (I live on the far western edge). After it was over, we found out it was about 5 miles east of that grain elevator, 7 miles from my house. In the pictures, the grain elevator was maybe 1/5 of the picture wide, looked fairly small as a grain elevator 2 miles away will. The tornado was as wide at the top as the entire picture, and it was 5 miles farther away.
Doper lieu lived here then, he remembers that one.
There is a helluva storm raging down about 10 feet behind me…outrageous downpour, coupled with good-sized hail.
I just hope this storm is moving southward, so it can help put with the wildfire causing havoc in the Pine Barrens right now.
5 minutes from home, I got caught in the downpour. That rain was freezing! Is it possible to get frostbite from a summer storm?
It hit Belmond. My husband’s family lived there, but we were living in Webster City at the time. The twister missed his parents’ house by a block or two, but took his brother’s place, and a good chunk of downtown.
I didn’t hear about the '66 tornado doing damage anywhere else. Yours must have been a different one. A google search mentions F4 twisters near Cedar Rapids in 1954 and 1990. (I didn’t know Ashton Kutcher and Elijah Wood were born in CR!)
I am a transplant to Massachusetts of almost 10 years. One of my hobbies is still bitching about things up here but the almost, but not complete, lack of tornadoes is not one of them. Where I grew up in NW Louisiana is part of tornado alley and I personally witnessed three of them growing up. We had several tornado drills in school each year and one time the school ding-ding-ding signals were real but we were spared although some of my classmates houses were not. The year I left for college, my hometown church took a direct hit and was obliterated (I am not sure what that is supposed to signify).
Tornadoes are probably nature’s most intense and scary phenomena because tornadoes are bizarre looking, they are personal like serpent chasing you, and they give little real warning. Tornadoes are one of the few things I can think of in which the people that are very accustomed to seeing them are almost as terrified as the newbie. Some people learn to chase them for sport but I never heard of anyone that wasn’t petrified when one turns in their direction.
It’s been raining since just after 5 on this side of the state. It should hopefully help them.
I had two co-workers decide to leave early and take Rt 9 home as we heard the parkway was closed for exits in the 50s and 60s. On the way home, I heard Rt 9 was not moving at all.
I told my one co-worker, she was better off going to the Ocean County Mall for 3 hours than trying to drive home. I fear I was correct.
Jim
I hate to think of the carnage that will ensue should tornadoes become more prevalent in the more densely populated east coast corridor (approx. VA to MA).
As far as “green skies” in thunderstorms, I’ve heard it was due to dust being tossed up into the air from high winds and updrafts, something not all that implausible in Tornado Alley, what with the flat farmlands there.
i work in East Hartford and at about the same time as KSO’s post the sky was simply black. i figured it would clear up fast as it didn’t have that funky yellowish undertone that means the weather is going to do something really drastic.
Speaking as someone who has been in structures damaged and destroyed by tornadoes on two different occasions, one the famous F5 Plainfield Tornado in which 2 people died in the same structure, I can say that they are a force which simply defies description. For all the talk of hurricanes, tornadoes can do the same damage to a structure in seconds that a hurricane does over several hours.
Heed those warning people, regardless of how many times they’ve amounted to nothing.
Dust, grass, leaves, etc. There was a pink tornado once (in Texas, IIRC); it got that hue after hitting a large floral nursery and sucking up all the carnations or whatever.
A tsunami can kill far more people, and with little warning. An earthquake can do quite a bit of damage. Even a snowstorm can have quite a high death toll. But even a killer snowstorm looks pretty. Tornados just look… wicked. I have never seen one that didn’t seem to posess a sort of malignant personality. Maybe it’s because they remind me of inverted witch hats.