Originally Posted By: geekster
My house was 75 yards from the 2013 Moore Oklahoma tornado. I was at work and was watching the weather on my computer. I called my wife to see if she was watching the TV? She got irritated and said "no, I'm working out" and I asked her where our daughter was. "Asleep" she says. I told her to turn on the TV grab our daughter and get in the shelter, that's in our garage floor, and call me as soon as she did. At this point the tornado was about an 1/8th of a mile from her. I could see all of this on my computer from the local broadcast. She never called.
I watched as the tornado went towards my house and I could do nothing about it. I couldn't tell what the tornado was damaging and I just assumed and prepared for the worse. As soon as the tornado passed I-35 I got in my car and headed to my house. The whole time I can't get a hold of my wife or any one of our neighbors. I only worked 10 miles from my house and as I got within 1.5 miles to my neighborhood it was gridlock. I ditched my car and ran towards my house. Worst feeling in my life. As I got closer to my neighborhood I could see the roofs still intact and was relieved. As I am coming down my street I see my wife holding our daughter in the front yard while insulation and debris floated in the air. It hit 75 yards north of us and decimated everything in it's path. It was a very traumatic and sad day. I felt extremely lucky and guilty all at the same time. This was the tornado where those beautiful children were trapped in the school and died. Mother nature is merciless.
My gosh, I started panicking as I read this...quite a post.
I saw a good sized funnel cloud once when driving from DeKalb, IL (sister went to NIU) back to the Chicago area. I was so scared that I couldn't even move my mouth to tell my mom about it. I was told that a tornado hit 2 blocks from where I grew up just before I was born, but it just landed in the middle of a wide street and picked up about 1/2 mile down the same street without seriously damaging any houses. Guess the trees got torn up pretty good, but property damage was slight. Despite living in Chicago, StL, and Dallas, I was pretty lucky about avoiding tornados.
I would totally freak out about tornado warning and watches when I was a kid and would always leave the house because I was worried about it collapsing on me...probably not too smart that we had a basement with lots of nooks I could have hidden in. I remember how irritated I would get by the tornado siren testing in StL because it would wake me up on mornings I didn't have early classes at WashU.
