Have you ever been in a really bad tornado?

Close, but no cigar. Got to see the coolest tornado form from beginning to end tho! (I didn’t take this video)

I’ve been in something close, though. The most scared I’ve ever been was about 2 months ago. I stepped out on the back deck to smoke, glanced up at the clouds…and did a double take. I said, Holy SHIT! to myself. Whatever it was was REALLY freaky…..I thought “tornado” but the sirens never went off and there was nothing on TV. Nothing. I heard the wind start to pick up and I grabbed my most important things (among them my DVD’s of family pictures) and got them down into the cellar under the stairs. I didn’t really want to be down there myself because it’s a dirt floor, low ceilings, “What the hell did I just step on??!!” kind of place. As I was gathering things up, the electricity went out….I could just feel it….something really bad was getting ready to go down. To this day I don’t know how I made it down in the cellar, in the pitch dark, no hand rail, steep stairs, with my arms full of stuff, and back up.
On top of all that I didn’t even have a flash light, just candles.
I was sitting at the top of the stairs listening to the wind, and the house started creaking. Rick was out of town at the time, and he REALLY pissed me off because he was dismissing my concern because there was nothing on TV. He kept telling me it was nothing. My voice was shaking, my body was shaking, I was almost panicky (and this girl don’t panic)....and he’s chuckling and basically telling me I was imagining things. I about called him every freaking name in the freaking book….I’ve lived here a LONG time and I know bad shit when it’s happening. I satisfied myself with just hanging up on him. At that point he decided to “humor me”.....then it hit. I thought the house was coming down around my ears and I yelled, “I gotta go!!!” and I hung up because I figured I’d need two hands pretty damn quick and didn’t want to lose the phone…..then it quit. Whatever It was, was over.
Yeah. Fifteen minutes later, me still sitting in the dark, shaking, Rick calls and says, “Holy shit Val!! What happened? The weather channel is saying tornados in town!! Multiple tornadoes! Are you OK? What happened?” I just about told him to kiss my black ass. But I didn’t. Because I’m white.
Electricity didn’t come on until about 3 a.m.
And I got up the next morning and went to work…the town was a wreck. I don’t know if they ever decided whether it was tornadoes or “just” massive straight line winds.

Then there was the time in 1990 when we got nailed by a massive hail storm. The North side of all of the houses and buildings in Wichita looked like a bomb had hit. THAT scared me too…especially when I looked out the door and saw that ugly, sickly green cloud heading our way! I also had the daycare with me….8 kids from 6 months old up to 10 years old. Fortunately I had a nice finished basement to cower in then.

I just watched that video I posted…the white tornado is the one I got to see form, and from about that angle and distance. It was beautiful…..several tornadoes formed at about the same time, and I think that’s what the other more boring video is of. I mean, all of that is EXACTLY what I saw!

I heard an F-1 go by my house and it’s something I hope never to hear again. It was raining so hard I couldn’t see anything, but there was a different note to it. Where it touched down it destroyed everything.

Where I live, tornados are only something you will see in the movies. However, a few years ago we did have one, In fact, we had a few.

Normally we don’t get tornados here, But we do get very big storms about 1ce a year. Anyway, in 2007 A massive storm his our island. One far bigger than we had ever had before. During this storm we also had a few tornados out at sea, but none that hit land.

I don’t know if the unusually strong storm caused the tornados, or if the tornados made the storm unusually strong, but it really was something to watch. At about 4pm, the sun vanished, and the sky turned black. 1000’s of trees got uprooted, and there was broken glass, crushed cars, and injured people everywhere.

Here Is a video on the storm coming in. It’s not me in the video, it’s not even anyone I know, but it is the correct storm.

The people in the video are saying:

“oh my mother! look at this!” and “Oh my, like a hallucination my friend” and “I have never seen anything like this in my life!”. ... The rest of the talking is someone talking to someone they know on a mobile, warning them to not go outside.

See many, never been in one. Interesting question….

I saw a waterspout out front my hotel when in Florida, that was very cool to see and i thought it would be fun to run through a massive dust devil….it wasn’t a good idea after all as it was like running through a sand blaster and took me the better part of the day to get the sand out of my eyes.

The closest I came to tornado was out running one the was heading right at me on the road. It was central Illinois and there was the darkest of dark storms to my right and I saw this huge tornado drop out of the sky maybe a ½ mile away….I guess the other cars saw it too because it was pedal to the metal and we all were doing 100+ mph and the tornado seemed to keep pace with us and I will never forget that site of that thing blasting across the road in my rear view mirror! I think back and it would have been cool to stop and take a picture but no F’n way at the time!! Those tornado chaser dudes are insane! I was scared out of my mind at the time. Close call for sure!

I’ve told this story a handful of times on Fluther already, but my very first memory was of an F5 tornado. That specific tornado holds records to this day, 25 years later. We were lucky not to be in the path that it hit, but rather a couple of blocks away, parallel to its path. My memories of that tornado are sketchy because I was so young. I remember seeing it, I remember my father’s excitement, I remember bits and pieces of the aftermath – only because it was such a massive and devastating storm. My father likes to tell the story of how he went out on a 4-wheeler with the neighbor to help people, and came across a house that looked unusual. After a few seconds of looking at the house, he realised that it had been completely turned around on its own foundation. The back of the house was now facing the street.

I’ve never been in a tornado, but I’ve been an avid storm watcher for most of my life, so I have seen a handful of tornadoes since the first one. In my experience they make different sounds. Some really do sound like a freight train, some sound like a massive airplane flying entirely too low. Deafening though, very very loud. One of the more interesting aftermaths that I’ve seen personally was of a relatively small twister (I don’t remember offhand, but I think it was an F1) , hit a warehouse down the street from my grandmother’s house. For several blocks it looked like toilet paper hanging from the trees and power lines – but it was actually the aluminum siding from the building.

@poisonedantidote Wow…yeah. We see that quite a bit here in Kansas. Always awe-inspiring!