Steven E. Wedel

Dark, soulful tales that haunt long after the last page.

Tornader watch


The National Weather Service has issued the first tornado watch of the season for central Oklahoma. Of course, a watch is nothing, really. We’ll just have to wait until this evening and see what develops. The wind is blowing pretty hard now and we had a decent little storm last night (knocked out the power for a while; I would have overslept if Jacob hadn’t been kicking me all morning).

The possibility of severe weather used to be a lot more exciting, until that tornado brushed by our house in 2003 and I was fighting traffic to get home, listening to the radio as they announced the monster moving along streets I drive on every day. Talk about a bad feeling. From the radio I knew the tornado had gone through our neighborhood — we’d just moved in nine days earlier. Then I got close and saw the houses ground to splinters. We had minor damage, but seven houses north of us was rubble.

Steven E. Wedel

5 responses to “Tornader watch”

  1. elizabethpeake Avatar
    elizabethpeake

    Thanks for bursting my happy bubble that Spring had finally sprung!
    🙂
    ~E~

    Reply
    1. sewedel Avatar
      sewedel

      What would I do if I wasn’t bursting happy bubbles?

      Reply
  2. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    (Marcy sneaking one in at work)
    Bloody hell… y’all be careful down there and don’t turn into rubble – okay?
    You’ll have to send me that University cam link again so I can keep my eye on you.

    Reply
  3. the_new_low Avatar
    the_new_low

    Man, I grew up in one of the tornado alleys in Colorado. I’ve seen 3 and when you see one of those things, I mean a BIG one, you really understand how insignificant we are in the nature’s scheme of things.
    One time a friend of mine were driving back to the town we grew up in after some adventure and had been watching these scary freaking clouds swirling around above us for a while. Then all the sudden it was like it was just there about a mile away from us. One minute it wasn’t there, the next, God was striding across the plains and was pissed. We got to town and called 911 to report a tornado and was told to hang up the phone and quit making prank calls. Luckily no one was hurt when it wiped out an old grain silo and some delapidated trailer homes. And damned if we ever got an apology from that emergency dispatcher.

    Reply
    1. sewedel Avatar
      sewedel

      I was a reporter for the Oklahoman newspaper and was covering a city council meeting in Moore (where I live now) when that F5 tore through S OKC, Moore and several other towns in 1999. That was the first tornado I ever actually saw, and it was a real monster. I had to drive through the wreckage immediately afterward. Cars were balled up like aluminum foil, grass was sucked out of the ground and asphalt was pulled out of the roadway in some places. Several people died, and it just so happened I saw the crew pulling the last missing body from a drain pipe beside Interstate 35 several weeks later; the woman had tried to take shelter there.
      Man truly is just a colony of specks at the mercy of tornadoes, tsunamis and such.

      Reply

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