Tornadoes

It can't happen to me

Post Oak from Mike and Debby’s woods, drawing by WRT.

In Oklahoma, the eastern woodlands give way to tall grass prairie, mottled with post oak forests. When prairie fires still marched across the land unimpeded, there was probably a lot less post oak than there is now, but Mike and Debby lived in a delightful patch of it. Mike studied his ants and Debby painted her beautiful wildlife art in a very personal, two-story house.

One of Debby’s bird drawings.

Somewhere along the line, they seem to have acknowledged that they lived in “tornado alley”, and decided that, in spite of low probabilities, perhaps a storm shelter might be a good idea. This took the form of a steel box sunk into the cement garage floor, with a steel lid that could be locked from the inside. There was barely room for two to hunker inside.

Tornado alley is a swath running northeastward across the US from Texas to Illinois and Indiana. Here weather fronts moving southeastward from the Pacific meet warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, and their collision sets up violent, rotating thunderstorms that can spawn tornadoes, sometimes hundreds of them as the front sweeps diagonally across the continent. No other region of the world can compete with the USA for the frequency of tornadoes, nor would any want to.

Only a month or two after Mike and Debby installed their shelter, a tornado warning in the general area sent them into it, just in case, and they expected to hunker for only a short time. There ensued a tremendous noise, like a thousand waterfalls, and then complete silence. Opening the hatch of their shelter, they encountered not the darkness of their garage, but the bright daylight of open sky. Their house was a pile of rubble and splinters some distance away, and their post oak forest was torn limb from limb, uprooted, broken, and stripped of green.

Mike and Debbie searching through the wreckage of their house. They are standing in the mouth of the shelter that saved their lives.

Digging through the rubble over the next few days, Debby found a drawing of a grey oak I had given them as a house gift. Miraculously, both it and Mike’s banjo were intact, but little else could be salvaged. Mike and Debby have since moved into town, but I am guessing that they understand that towns are no safer from the devastation of tornadoes than are post oak forests, so I am pretty sure they have a really good tornado shelter in their new house.

Wouldn’t you?

The grey oak drawing that survived the tornado. Drawing by WRT.