I was reminded tonight that it's once again tornado season here in the midwest states. I was just wondering if anyone had any tornado stories to share?

I lived in Columbia, Missouri, one year when seven tornadoes touched down in a three hour period, but I never saw any of them. (As a side note, I heard later that the warning sirens were going off an average of twenty minutes *after* each tornado touched down!) I also slept through the tornado that went over my house a couple of years later. In fact, I've never seen one in real life, though they populate my nightmares pretty regularly.

Anyone here been in one? Any storm chasers or near misses to tell us about? Finally, anyone care to discuss how to tell if one's about to form?

Oh, and if there are no tornadoes in your part of the world, what kind of scary weather *do* you have?

Anyway, I just thought it might be something interesting to discuss.

We don't have tornadoes here. Just strong wind lol.

I've always wondered what it is like to trapped in a tornado, but also think it's a blessing we don't get them as I have seen the devastation on TV. There's a lot of things like that we fortunately don't get here!

I think the scariest weather that people experience, here, although I hasten to add, not me, is flooding, as that is known to strike certain areas and cause loss of life and mass devastation. Other than that, really strong wind, isn't so much scary as annoying, although one time the wind was that strong I nearly got blew into the road in front of a car, but only nearly.... lol.

Ames x

Ahh Ames you were too young...We had a hurricane 1987 here in the UK, well Southern England and was famously dismissed as not going to happen by a certain well known weatherman. LOL!
It hit London and the home counties with 122 mile an hour winds and killed 18 people. London lost power for the first time since the blitz and 1.9 billion pounds worth of damage was created. I can remember being at school that day and having to be evacuated because the winds were getting stronger and that night it hit. Very frightening. Our Garage got blown down, the fences in the garden, a tree up the road was toppled into a house. I thought the roof of the house was going to come off. It was not good.

Apart from that as Ames says we don't really get extreme weather, in fact that hurricane was the first since 1701 or something, apart from very bad flooding.

I would be terrified of living in an area hit by tornado's. I have always wondered why people live in area's such as tornado alley knowing the dangers.

I was born in 1987 hehehe, so naturally I wouldn't remember it.

Where I live where even more less prone to bad weather (the Midlands) as obviously we are not by the sea, although some people nearby have experienced floods from the River Severn, but I live in a high area, so floods don't affect me

I do remember the Dudley earthquake though, that woke me up it was so violent hehehe.

On the contrary, the Uk averages 35 reported tornadoes a year - which actually works out more per square mile than the USA We estimate that probably half of all tornadoes fail to be reported so in reality we could be looking at nearer 70 a year.

Of course, nearly all below F1 on the Fujita scale - they cause very little damage.

Whatever the media may say though, may I please emphasis most strongly that there is no such thing as a mini tornado

btw I've got several friends getting read to head out stormchasing next month

As for 'hurricane': well, the 1987 storm produced hurricane strength winds - just as many storms that hit northern parts of the UK do every year. It wasn't a hurricane though Technically, we got hit by a sting jet - a meteorological phenomena which wasn't known of at the time.

Awesome subject!!
Im from Oklahoma City,OK and have seen about 3 tornados,but have seen dozens of the aftermath.Like Moore,Ok and Shawnee,Okin the late 90's
.I know a weatherman In the city there that is a storm chaser..really awesome..about 10 miles from my house In Mississippi, a tornado did some tragic damage..lived in Corpus Christi,Tx and been thru a few hurricanes..tornados are beautiful, but as we all know deadly..

So up north you have strong winds averaging 122 mph?

That was three years before I was born

Scary.

Hurricane strength winds are those average 74mph or more.

Btw the strongest gust recorded at low level in the UK was at Fraserburgh on the Scottish east coast on 13th Feb 1989 - 142 mph The 1987 storm produced sustained windspeeds of around 85mph at Shoreham, not sure off hand what the strongest gust was.

>.< damn tornados, luckily i never get any near me... closest tornado ever near me was 4 hours drive from me

I live on Tornado Alley but my community has not had a catagory #2 tornado or higher (Thank God). This is the season alright. We have been having weeks of high winds. My nieghbor had her tall tree's fall upon parts of her home about 3 times last yr. I had tree damage too but nothing fell on my roof yet.
My town gets flooded but I live on the Hills.
Texas hasn't been hit with a Hurricane in awhile now and those high winds and flooding do reach my area.
My daughter's boyfriend lives in Ada Oklahoma and I don't want her to move there!!!!! But, anything can happen to you but I don't want her to be apart from me. now me sad

When I was a young lad, I was in the front seat of my car driving home with my family from my aunts house, and out of the blue, it started to hail and rain heavily... We continued to drive until a small truck that was carrying logs stopped infront of us. At first we thought 'what the hell is this guy doing,' but then we realised what exactly was happening. Just as it explains on snopes.com, a tornado/twister actually passed right infront of us... Right. Infront. Of. Us! and really, there was no danger, but at the time I was pretty scared... It was just like a wall of black that came out of the woods on the opposite side of the road, it crossed and just passed the far side of a ditch, and "disappeared" out of sight. So, we started driving again, came home and heard nothing of it until the next day, when we learned it ripped up a screen at the drive in. I went told my friends at school I was there and I saw it, but they didn't believe me.

True story. It was pretty crazy.

wow. thats scary, luckily, where i live, im in a valley, so i don't have to worry about any tornadoes, however, i do have to worry about volcanoes......

We want to groove with Dorothy and her munchkin friends. We hope the tornado comes tonight.

Todo is wholesome.

Wow! Some awesome stories there, guys! (Poor Bex! {{{hugs}}} Must be rough being a mom!)

There was a tornado near here when I was in grade school that picked up three horses from a field and set them down in another field without hurting them.

I think I saw a tornado forming over my hometown a couple of years ago. I was standing out in front of Wal Mart, watching the sky. There were these huge, dark black and grey clouds everywhere and the whole mass of them was turning in a circle, really slowly. Then the whole bit moved off to the northeast. I heard that there was a tornado spotted at a town off that way about an hour later.

Anyway, tornadoes are scary, but I think a volcano is much, much worse!

I've been through three of them. The first was the worst of the three that hit. It began around 6:30am one morning and hit out of the blue. My family and I were still asleep and I remember my mother waking me up and by that time it was pitch dark with no power and we struggled getting down to a safe place in the basement den. I have no idea why people compare the sound to a freight train, I honestly can make no comparisons myself. All I remember was this low groaning sound and thought that it would never end. Afterwards, when it was finally safe to go back upstairs, the daylight had broken. We stepped outside and I will never in my entire life forget the smell. Pine trees have a very distinctive smell to them, and it was gut-wrenching. There were trees down everywhere, but I was not prepared for what I was about to see. A couple of us went around and walked into the 'back' of our neighborhood, it was a utter nightmare. Houses were literally taken off of their foundations and thrown across yards. Other houses were just obliterated. There was clothing and pictures, gutters and house siding strung about it trees. People were walking around bloodied, the roads were hardly visable. Power lines were down, you could see them sparking.. and finally the police came. Our particular neighborhood was so bad that they had to close it off for days. The only way you could get in was to have a piece of police ribbon. To this day, there is still fragments of gutters and such in the trees.

Two years later, it happened again. It was around the same time in the morning, and my father had just gotten to work. Again, it happened so quickly it was hard to react. This one ended up sucking two windows off of the back of our house, and then threw two trees on it as well. It didn't do as much damage, but it was still bad. That horrible smell was back, and this time a lot of people actually moved because it happened again so soon. A neighbor had a tree thrown through her bedroom, luckily she gets up very early and it didn't harm her. We couldn't believe that it happened again, it was pretty overwhelming. We also had an apple tree that it split in half and threw the other half across the yard.

The third happened not long ago. I was at work this time and it struck a little before sunset. It didn't do much damage at all, just knocked over some trees. We have a lot of windows at the front of our building, and you couldn't see hardly anything outside. It was more of that feeling of, here we go again. That feeling is the worst.

We have also been through the remnants of Hurricane Opal and a couple of others. It ended up throwing a huge oak tree across the side of our house. They said that if it weren't for it being brick, it would have severed it basically into. Besides those, ice storms, blizzards, floods, been through them all. I live in such a pleasant place.

Wow! That's scary! Glad you're not hurt! I'm guessing you're down south somewhere, like Georgia?

We had something called "microbursts"(?) here last summer and they did a lot of the kind of damage you associate with tornadoes. I know of several houses that had trees through the roofs and I drove past a place where a house trailer had been picked up, demolished, and the remains strewn across the highway. Miraculously, the guy who was in it at the time survived!

On my little dirt road (where I live I'm very isolated) my nephews and the neighbors logged out, I think, 26 trees in a third of a mile stretch. Oddly enough, there were no trees down on my land (though a couple fell in the following weeks, probably weakened by the storm) and my old house was untouched.

In fact, I didn't even realize how bad the storm had been until I tried to leave for work. I turned out of my driveway and the road, in both directions, was a solid wall of green. It was scary as it was happening, though! I was in my living room watching substantial trees whipping back and forth and bending double outside the window!

The top end of Australia gets hurricanes, but where I live in the mountains every summer is a high risk of bush fire.

Fires are our major threat, the house we're in now will go up in flames if a severe fire comes through. The area we're in is classed as the biggest fire risk in NSW as it hasn't burnt since 94. If a fire gets in the Grose Valley many of the suburbs that adjoin it will go.

Oooh someone tape a tornado...lol I don't get them where I live, about the worst natural disaster we've had was flooding and that was when I was about 5.

Few bad storms though.

Oh and bushfires. Not where I live exactly but a few suburbs away. Been bad the past few years, the sky just fills up with smoke and ash, ad well, it smells like fire all through the house even though it's miles away.

There was a tornado in the town I was born in at the exact time I was born... Since then I have never been in one or really ever near one... Its all good though... Don't really need any of that... lol

LBD

You hit the nail on the head Elfstone.

Georgia is becoming more and more increasingly savage when it comes to bad weather. We even had a very small earthquake back a couple of years ago. So far things have been unusually quiet this year though. Lots of heavy rain and consistant winds, but nothing really severe.

There are quet a few tornadoe warnings/watches up here too, cause tornadoes devolop faster on da praries. Mostly, just warnings though, I think everyone is just parnoid. No tornadoe watch is gonna hold me back.

Just last year we had a tornado touch down in Bradgate which is around 30 miles from where I live. It was devastating and took out most of the homes in town. Trees were uprooted or leveled off. To think that could have been here where I live is scary.

When I was younger we had one go through Ft. Dodge(where I lived at the time). It hit right next to the apartment building we lived in. There were buns and food laying around where it hit the local restaurant. It also blew all the windows out of a nursing home. There were urinals and bedpans strung out all over the place.

It was your mention of pine trees. "Georgia! Georgia! Moonlight through the pines . . . ." Also I have a friend who lives in Georgia, so I've noticed how bad the weather's been down there the past few years. Scary stuff!

Tia, do you do anything to be prepared in case of a bad fire? They have those here, out west, and I read a lot about fire precautions during the last really bad group of them. They have some houses that are supposed to be designed to survive fires, though I don't know if they would, and some of them have "safe rooms" even. (Not that I'D feel safe!) For the rest of the population, they were advising people to keep the brush back from their houses and stuff like that.

I like Tornado season but unfortunatly some don't because houses get destroyed and lot's of property and houses as well. But tornado season is the best because when you look at them form it's Fascinating it's Beutiful and the incredible force that it has! My aunt's house has been taken before by a tornado it wasn't pretty it was all over some parts ended up in a town 2 miles away wierd! tornado clouds funnel clouds are wierd when there on top of you because they spin in a cyclone and they move in on place real slow. Everyone get ure cams!

I have seen two tornadoes. One was when I was about 14 and my mom, her boyfriend and my brother were coming back from cedar point and I woke up to my little brother saying, Wake up look at the light show. We were on the freeway and by like plains (open lands) and the lightning looked as if it was almost touching the ground. Then the radio said something like a tornado has been spotted by this highway we were on. We stopped under neath an overpass with a tourbus and some other cars before we knew it the tornado just went past the freeway to the other side taking out a barn and stuff. I was super scared so I started to cry and hid between two concete things of the overpass until my mom came to get me.

Second one I seen was more a waterspout. (tornado in the water)
It was in 98 I believe, and me and a group of my friends just got into the line for the raptor at Cedar Point... then all of the sudden the front of the line people started running towards, it was like a godzilla movie with the rush of many people running. So we were like what is going on, and some people next to us started pointing in the sky, naturally we all looked where they were and there it was. A funnell cloud touching the water and the sky at the same time. we started to run for cover, people were falling and tripping on stuff, and I almost got hit by a table unbrella but someone pushed me outta the way before I got hit. When the funnel went up from the water and started to move itself back up into the sky, you could look up and see the clouds circle above your head. Needlesstosay that was pretty freeky but at the same time awesome. It rained for hours after that, finally when the heavy rain stopped we got back on the Raptor.!

Back when I was in elementary school, a tornado touched down and tore out a building near the high school. we were in a small concerete room until the warnings passed, didn't get to see that one though.