What would you do if the tornado sirens went off in your area?

That green is hail, BTW.

I’d probably check my zipcode in disbelief. No tornado sirens up here, though a photo like that almost makes me wish… nah, it doesn’t really. Scary stuff.

Edit: Wait, tornadoes make you hungry?

You get used to it! It cleared up, but now it’s turning yellow again, which means more storms coming in.

Frankly, I’m not sure. I worry about it a lot this time of year. We get a lot of ‘em

A huge one once skipped across my mother back yard. Took out a very old tree and did some ground damage, and did a lot of damage along its path to the downtown area, but but mother’s house was spared. Oh, and she was cowering in the bath tub the whole time.

I live in a 2-story house in a suburb area know as Tornado Alley. I’d go to the first floor, but after that, no emergency plan.

BTW, I’ve had some awful dreams through the years that a tornado was headed toward me and there was nothing I could do.

No sirens (none in the county) and we have a few severe storms every year. Five people have been killed in tornadoes in the last four years in the county. We have Weather Radios on both levels of the house. Both my cell phone and my wife’s are set-up for Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), which work anywhere there is severe weather alert, not just for your home town or area. We also have the city reverse 911 for alerts for weather, gas main breaks and escaped convicts…. etc. We had two tornadoes go overhead in the last 6 years they didn’t down here but did before or after our house on the tornado’s path.

We had a tornado once about 30 miles from here and everyone was shocked. It actually touched down in a field.

@Dutchess_III
Oh, have beer for me.

I’ve never seen a tornado, apart from a crappy one that didn’t even touch the ground.
My first thought before I read the details of this question was to grab my camera also.

We have a central hall by the washer and dryer closet, we can get three dogs, wife and myself in sitting position. No outside walls or glass windows, appliances on both sides of hall and plumbing for structure. We almost used it April 16th 2011, touchdown was one and half miles away and video made nation tv by guy sitting in his company truck in supermarket parking lot as funnel cloud came within a couple hundred yards.

@Tropical_Willie I’ve had 3 beers, just for you!

It was a little crazy. Went to auction today where we got this that I am SO thrilled with. Ran ahead of the storm to get it home before it rained. Then my husband headed to Rock, Kansas to see a man about a trailer…and all hell broke loose. They were talking about Rock on the TV as the location of a touch down. Rick said he’d pulled to the side of the road because it was raining too hard to see….and the wind was rocking the truck. A couple of times it rocked so hard he just thought “Well, here we go…..” My only thought was “Shit!! That would have messed up the truck!” The sirens went off twice here, before he got home. And I was hungry and I couldn’t find the broom. But man, do I love my Barrister Bookshelves, even if they are modern. :)

Life as a redneck. :)

I’d probably run outside and say, “what the heck is that?”
Or stand in the door jam thinking its an earthquake siren.
We don’t get tornados in these parts. Ill take an earthquake over a tornado any day!

I’d rather have an earthquake!

Assume it was a hoax & carry on regardless.

We don’t normally have tornadoes and we don’t have tornado sirens here. I have no idea what I would do. They sound scary.

We get tornadoes, but don’t have sirens. Go figure. (We do get TV/radio emergency broadcasts.) For me, it depends on where I am when in the path. At home, head for the basement. At a bar, directly in the path of a very close tornado? What choice do you have but to keep right on drinking! That’s just what we did a few years ago, while watching the tornado come right at us in real time on the bar TV. It was scary, but so fun!

@Bellatrix The sirens sound just like the air raid sirens they had in England in WWII. Well, they’re the same sirens but I always flash on the bombers gathering over London when I hear them. And all the dogs start howling. It’s a racket, for sure!

We don’t even have a basement or tornado sirens.
I did hear fire alarms going off in a near by building (I guess those are a substitute or something) when a waterspout was passing right by us. We all ran outside to take pictures of it. Some people ran into the restroom to hide. We were like partying at a condo complex when that happened.

There was a time at home when a tornado came through during a hurricane. We didn’t have any kind of alarm or anything, but we heard the wind making those freaky sounds and the trees snapping like crazy so it was pretty obvious. We all just like huddled up in the bath tub and covered ourselves with a big blanket.

Oh hell yes I would go to the basement after I got as much footage as I could.

Tornados are fast I was in one as a little kid in a trailer, they may be beautiful at first but they are not fun and the devastion afterwards is not beautiful at all.

Well, we don’t have sirens, but when my office was hit by a tornado a couple of months ago, I dove under my desk and swore I’d force them to allow me to have a cubicle far away from the wall of windows.

I sit in the back of the office now, near the kitchen. Close proximity to coffee > close proximity to “hurricane proof” glass.

Breaking News: Tornado in More Oklahoma, south of Oklahoma City has taken out an elementary school full of children.

Oh that’s just awful @YARNLADY.

Yeah….It was worse than the one that hit that same area in 1999.

From what I’ve heard, the one that hit More was a mile-wide F4, that had wind speeds up to 200 MPH (320 KPH). :-o

Hurricane Gilbert was like a 588-miles-wide F4. :-O

I’m watching the live coverage and it’s just so sad to see people, with children, walking along the street with possibly nowhere to go. When you look at the aerial view, that’s nothing left.

They’ll have some place to go. I imagine homes are opening up all over the state, if not in neighboring states. I know my home is open if anyone needed it.

I had no idea this was coming when I posted this question. I remember the 1999 tornado. I had stepped out in to the alley behind where I worked to smoke. When I hit the outside I just froze….the oppression was palpable. I knew there was going to be a tornado, a bad one. Just didn’t know where. It hit about 5 hours later. I’ll never forget that feeling. I knew.
You know, we get so complacent…....

This is what the storm chasers caught.

So far 37 people are dead.

I meant there’s nothing left. They have to get to those homes first @Dutchess_III. People seem to be walking around with backpacks with their possessions in them. They have to clear the area to be able to access transport. From what I can understand anyway from the live coverage I was watching.

Some footage of damage in Shawnee, OK.

Yes, I live in @YARNLADY ‘s zone and Tornados are rare. I would go for the herbal essence to take the edge off of the anxiety and then hunker down in whatever safe zone I had available.
Really, I live in forest fire land over here and the feeling is the same. Many times I have seen and smelled smoke and had wildfires raging close by.

Nature is scary in all it;s elements.

Nature is deadly. :(