Tornadoes

Oh my!

My wife uses her radio as her alarm in the morning. Typically, I get up before her, but since I was up all night the night before, I kept hitting my snooze, and her radio finally clicked on, and the first word I heard was Tornado Warning... WTF? It isn't even 6am yet! Now, having lived basically my entire life in states where tornadoes are common, I know that they can hit anywhere, anytime. However, I've rarely, if ever, heard of a tornado happening before 6am or after 12 midnight.

I listened and realized that the threat was pretty far away, and would most likely pass by us to the North.

Whenever I hear about tornadoes, my mind goes back to a time that I'll never forget. June 3rd, 1980. Many of you may have heard of what happened on this date, many have probably not.

I lived through it.

On the evening of June 3rd, 1980, SEVEN tornadoes struck the town of Grand Island, NE. Seven. Ranging from F0 to F4 on the Fujita Scale.

I was 8 at the time. This was one of those incidents in your life you'll never forget. Ever.

The first tornado touched down around 8:45pm that evening. It was a F3 rated tornado, and our neighborhood was the first one hit. The tornado was 700 yards wide, and cut a path 7 miles long. It hit our neighborhood like a freight train.

Our house was directly in its path.

Thank god for the sirens.

I'd like to think it was the quick thinking of my father that saved our house. He opened up every window and every door in the house. We hid downstairs under the stairs when it hit. It sounded like a freight train.

The tornado hit our house, and the houses in front and back of us, and at least 2 houses away on each side. The amazing thing, was our house was the only one that didn't lose its roof. The house in front of lost its. The houses on both sides lost theirs. The roof from the house behind us was in our back yard. I say my father saved my house, because it is my opinion, that because all the windows and doors were opened, that the tornado "passed" through our house. In the cases of our neighbors, the none of them had their windows open, and the intense vacuum created by the tornado ripped the roofs right off their houses.

You know how they say a tornado can drive a straw through a 2x4? Well, we had hundreds of holes in our room. Most of them with 2x4s sticking out of them.

We found our dog kennel that was 20 feet long, 6 feet high, and 5 feet wide, 4 blocks away.

I'm not ashamed to say it, but I pissed my pants when the tornado hit. Literally. The one time in my life it has ever happened.

Anyways, our neighborhood was just the first. Five of the seven tornadoes were on the ground at the same time in different parts of the city. Two of these were anti-cyclonic which is quite rare for tornadoes.

5 people died in a city of over 30,000. $600 million in damage was caused. If it wasn't for the early warnings of the sirens, many more would have died.

I remember being without electricity and water for at least a week. Every morning we'd be cleaning up and the Red Cross would come around with milk and doughnuts.

When we heard that Jimmy Carter was coming to view the destruction, one of our neighbors painted the following on the only side of his house that was still standing: "Don't send Jimmy. Send Beer!"

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