My Tornado Encounter
Entry posted by simplybill
1,051 views
My first blog entry! I'm looking forward to sharing a few small adventures.
I live in a 2-story 1940’s farmhouse on the Mississippi-Missouri Divide in the rolling hills of western Iowa. My acreage sits on a hilltop above a long, wide draw that occasionally funnels the southern wind into dangerous straight-line winds. The low farm fields to the west offer little resistance in slowing down the massive thunderstorms that move across the prairie. I remember, years ago, sitting at my dining room window and watching as an 80-mph straight-line wind blew the roof shingles from the back of the house onto the front lawn. That 80-mph windstorm lasted for fourteen hours!
One night I was sleeping upstairs when I was startled awake by an enormous sound. I knew it was no ordinary windstorm. From my peaceful slumber I was thrown into a frightening maelstrom of dense, all-encompassing fury. The room was filled with a shrill, high-pitched scream. I felt I was surrounded on all sides by supersonic freight trains bearing down on me from every direction. It was as though I was submerged under ten feet of water, only instead of water I was immersed in a furious, high-pressure noise.
My first instinct was to flee to the safety of the basement, and I bounded from my bed.... but then I hesitated, and I thought, “I’ll probably never experience this again in my life.” So, rather foolishly, I forced myself to stand there in the middle of the room, and experience all of that fury.
It was exhilarating…
....for about three seconds….and then something hit the side of the house at a hundred miles an hour and the entire house was violently shaken. I had a brief vision of the house being torn from the foundation and folding up on itself, and me being crushed to death inside of it.
Then something weird happened that I can’t explain: it was as though every brain cell in my head, in unison, yelled, “RUN!!!” And so I did. I sprinted down the stairs, through the dining room, the kitchen, and down the basement stairs in probably less than three seconds.
I was in the basement for maybe ten minutes and then the sound just...stopped. There was a torrential rainstorm going on outside, but the wind had disappeared. I went upstairs, and then ran back to the basement to gather up buckets and pans to place under the holes in my leaking roof.
I was worried that my dogs may have panicked and jumped the fence. I put on a raincoat, grabbed a flashlight, and ran out into the rain and the darkness to check on them. Their shed was still upright, but it had been moved backwards off of its foundation. I opened the top half of the door and shined the flashlight inside. Rascal and Bubba were standing in the corner with wide-eyed looks of “What the heck was that all about!!”
At sunup, I went out to survey the damage. The yard was littered with broken tree limbs and shingles, and the side of the house had a gouge where a piece of metal from the barn had slammed into it. A window was blown out of the corn crib, and broken shards of glass formed a shining path across the ground for eighty feet or so. A mile to the south, my neighbor’s barn had been badly damaged, and a barn to the north of me was completely flattened.
It was quite a chore getting everything cleaned up…. but I was alive, and my dogs were alive, and I’d had the adventure of a lifetime. I love living here.
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