Sunday, November 06, 2005

Twister!

My phone rang at the 2:30 this morning. The caller was a family friend telling me to prepare to take cover.

A tornado was on the way.

I was lucky but a lot of other people in Indiana and Kentucky were not. At last count 17 are dead.

I am proud to say the locals were on this immediately. Neighbors helped neighbors.


So far nobody has blamed Bush or FEMA or anyone other than Mother Nature herself.

Considering that this is the midwest and we tend to be a stoic sort who find emotional outbursts to be just so tacky I doubt you will.

4 comments:

Syl said...

How horribly frightening :(

I'm relieved you're okay. I was worried about you while I was washing dishes. Don't ask. LOL

Rick Ballard said...

Terrye,

Glad to hear that you were not touched by this disaster. Some reports are mentioning that the interval between the warning sirens sounding and the tornado striking was very short. Is there a general knowledge that "you have X time to take cover" from the point at which you hear a warning?

Unknown said...

As a general rule there is no warning, especially out in the sticks like this.

In some small towns there is the all purpose civil alert siren that is used to rouse people.

It is very unusual to have these kinds of storms this time of year around here.

I remember being in storms like this back in Oklahoma as a kid. One time we had over 30 people in our storm cellar. I don't have a cellar here..I have a ditch behind the garden shed.

Once in the panhandle of Oklahoma my father outran a tornado. They say don't do that. But there were no ditches, there was nothing but miles of wheat.

The tornado looked white from picking up the wheat chaf and I can still remember my Dad telling us to get down and then wrappiing his big arms around the steering wheel of that 64 Plymouth and putting his foot down. My mother was praying, my little brother was hiding in the floor board and I just could not keep my eyes off that twister.

Daddy got us the hell out of the way of the thing.

That was a very long time ago.

Charlie Martin said...

Don't worry, Terrye, I heard the news people saying all day that FEMA was so overtaxed it couldn't possibly be adequate to dealing with 15 square miles of more trouble. So the military would have to be called in for sure.

I swear, these people actually just ache for a military government.