May 1, 2011

  • May 1, 2011 – Tornadoes!  (Not here.) 

    I have been, perhaps, inordinately interested in the Alabama tornadoes.  But, then again, maybe it is an ordinate amount, after all.  I do love weather events.  Perhaps it comes from being the daughter of a meteorologist-by-training?  I remember when Hurricane Katrina came I had just moved into my new house.  I found it fascinating, and watched a streaming-over-the-internet news channel for two days before it actually hit.  That time it was purely interest in the strength of nature.  (Why do we call it “mother nature”, when so often nature is anything but motherly?)  On Wednesday my sister Merrie Jo called up on the phone to say that she was going to die in an hour.  I think she was only half-joking.  The tornado sirens were blaring in the background.  She was busy eating up the Doritos and the Easter candy.  A huge storm was scheduled to hit her location in about an hour.  I think she was setting the laundry room up to be her storm shelter.  Perhaps, in the past, they had gone in a closet under the stairs?  (I’m sure I’ll have some inaccuracies in this story, because it’s not really my story.)  After I hung up with her I searched around on the internet for a Huntsville news station that I could get over the internet.  I also checked the internet for the radar, and there sure was a big wall of red heading their way.  The news channel was fascinating.  Our neighbor girl Haley comes over to stay with us on Wednesdays, so she was over and fascinated by the coverage too.  At first they had a tower cam of some sort showing what they said was a wall cloud, and then there was a mention of a shelf cloud (what’s a shelf cloud? We don’t have those here!).  Then there was what appeared to be a funnel cloud forming right in front of our eyes.  Then that camera went out, and they struggled and got another camera working for another minute or so, and then that one went out too.  After that we didn’t see many live pictures, if any.  But the meteorologists and news people were hard at work updating the severe weather maps constantly.  They kept looking for areas of circulation and then doing Storm Tracks, which calculated how many minutes before that area of circulation would hit various communities.  Then they were talking about various things on the radars… perhaps areas of intake? Inflow?  And then later in the day they showed a debris ball – a large area on the radar that reflected just from the debris flying in the air.  (Later on Merrie Jo said she saw that from her front porch – the actual debris ball, not just the part on the radar.)  After that storm hit I called my sister again.  She had gone to her neighbor’s house; he (?) had come to get her and the two babies and they had gone to his house.  I asked if that house was safer, and she said not really, but at least they were together.  After that she sent out on her iphone a picture of Jameson and the neighbor’s kid in their storm closet/room.  One had on a bicycle helmet and one had on a football helmet and there were lots of pillows around, I think, to act as a cushion.  We talked later, and she had gone home and Jimmy was there.  He had been at work and thought there was an hour before the big storm hit, so he stayed to eat his lunch before coming home.  But the storm was faster than they thought and he was stuck at work longer…. ?  But then when he did come home there was a downpour of rain so hard that he couldn’t see anything and had to pull over and thought that he might be hit by a tornado and not even know it.  But he wasn’t, and finally made it home, and Merrie Jo went home too.  Then there was another storm coming… what is it – an area of circulation?  And on the news they show charts saying things like “Madison – 8 minutes” (that’s where she lives).  I think it was after that tornado (it was) went by that I called back and Merrie Jo said that they had seen it from their front porch.  She had run back to the laundry room with the kids, but Jimmy had stayed awhile longer.  I wondered if he had taken pictures.  Later she said they had video, but it didn’t really show the reality of the situation well.  (I think.)  Then I think there was another potential tornado coming, and then after that the news showed yet another one coming to Madison in 22 minutes, and I called back incredulously, “22 more minutes?  Really?” and the baby (3.5 months old) was screaming and she had to go, and that was the last I heard of her that day.  And then there was another huge tornado that went by (the one that I think was later assessed at 190 mph winds, EF4 on the scale, 10 mph below the highest level of EF5).  I guess she saw it too?  And Jimmy saw it?  From the porch?  Later on she said that the neighbor guys never go inside the house for tornadoes, but that with this one a neighbor saw the water from the pond across the street being sucked up into the air, and there was debris flying above the houses.  And then those guys all went running inside to their shelters.  (This reminds me of one of the youtube videos I saw, where another guy was filming a tornado and then suddenly said “oh shit!” and went running for the closet.  The camera was left filming, and the house survived, so the video got posted to youtube.)  After the fact, when I finally talked to my sister again, she said the house was creaking and popping and straining, and she was rather expecting it to go flying off from around her.  But thank God it didn’t!  I’m not sure how far she actually was from that tornado.  She thought maybe a mile; her neighbors had gone and seen the damage and said it was terrible.  From the maps I can find on the internet thus far I would think a bit further than that.  But her friends who lived two blocks away had their windows shattered by their patio furniture which had gone flying over their house and into the windows.  So – I think she was plenty close enough. 

    We didn’t hear much from her after that.  The power was gone, and is still off 4 days later.  She’s hoping it might come back on Tuesday, the sixth day after the storm.  (I was talking to her today and she said that she had never expected something like that.  In the past a storm would come through and the power would go off for an hour and then come back on and that would be that.)  ATT apparently lost a lot of phone coverage so her cell phone hardly worked.  Perhaps it was just the sheer number of calls people were trying to make, although apparently the Verizon people had better luck.  She finally got through to my mom later in the evening to say that they were okay.  I had always assumed they would be, but the coverage of all these tornadoes that just coming in wave after wave finally had me just ever-so-slightly uncertain.  I had gone to the gym and felt a bit cut off from my news sources.  At the gym they were showing on the TV the video (I think it might have been live? Or it was taped from the previous live broadcast) of the Tuscaloosa tornado.  For some reason I was thinking that that one wasn’t so severe, though now I know I was in error.  I think I was just fretting a bit about my sister and her family and wanted to hear about the other parts of Alabama, and not just the dramatic scene where the tornado was caught live on television.  

    So… hmmm.   Where was I?  So they were safe, but with no electricity.  Her business (The Stem and Stein wine bar) also had no electricity, and they have had $3000 worth of food spoiling there.  I guess they had water; my mom saw something that said that people in Madison were being asked to self-evacuate, since they had no power or water, but I never heard that from my sister.  After a day or so, her 3-yr old son Jameson started throwing up and had diarrhea, and MJ wondered if she had given him bad milk.  They were thinking about driving 7 hours to South Carolina where her mother-in-law lives, and were actually packing up on Friday.  But then the cell phone service got better, and she figured she could hand-wash a lot of laundry in the 7 hours it would take to drive to SC. 

     

    So they have a grill and they’ve been grilling up all the nicest meat that they’d been saving for a special occasion.  All the neighbors are doing the same.  She says it smells like the mountains (by which I think she means it smells like campfires) and it’s been a pretty big party.  Jimmy got all their open wine from the wine shop to drink before it goes bad, and everyone is eating, drinking, feasting, and having a big neighborhood party before all their food goes bad.  At night they can see the stars very well.  (Reminds me of the time when I was in the blackout in New York City; we went to a park in north Manhattan and went star-gazing.)  I think she had a complaint about it being difficult to take care of the baby at night with the flashlight…?  But mostly it’s been okay.  She does what she usually does anyway, but Jimmy is there to help her, and he’s not busy on a computer or on the phone.  At first she hand-washed the laundry, but today she said a neighbor had gotten a generator and let them wash their clothes there.  She hangs the clothes out to dry on the patio furniture, and it works okay.  They got some dry ice now, though she thinks it might be too late for the food at her shop.  We wonder if perhaps she’ll be able to file an insurance claim?  I asked when she thought the power would come back, and she thought maybe Tuesday, as they’re trying to connect the stores and gas stations first, so that people can get food and gas. 

    I’m sure I forgot some things that were of interest to me, but it’s time to pick up our sweet (and whiny—Madeleine – and disgusting – Grant) children from the neighbor’s house.  So – toodles! 

    Brian just said to me:  “It’s good you blogged.  It’s good for the soul!”  I laughed, and he said, “For you it is!”  So there you have it, folks.