One year ago, I thought that we were going to die. Seriously. I have never been *too* scared of thunderstorms, and if the tornado sirens were going off, I wasn't usually very worried. In fact, you could probably find me outside, looking at the storm. (Not in a freaky storm-chaser way, but in a "I have lived in tornado alley all of my life and it takes a lot to get me to go the basement" kind of way). May 1st was no different. The sirens went off at about 7:00 that evening, but it was pretty calm outside, so I took Owen (who was less than 3 months old at the time) to bed and laid down. The sirens eventually stopped, and all was good. They were calling for severe thunderstorms later that evening, but that was about it.
At about 2:00 a.m., I woke up to banging sounds coming from outside our house. We had been sleeping with the tv on since Owen was so little and was still getting up to nurse throughout the night, and I woke up to the banging sound, saw that Brian Busby was on TV (if Busby is on the air at 2 am...you know something is going down!), and then the power went out. Immediately after we lost power, I woke Chris up, grabbed Owen from our bed where he was sleeping, and RAN for the basement. Our house was shaking so bad, and the sound was so incredibly loud that Chris and I were screaming at each other to figure out where to go, and we couldn't hear each other. As we were running to the basement, our windows were getting blown out, and our roof was getting ripped apart. It was pretty intense. We finally made it to the basement, and our house was a rockin'. I sat in our basement closet and cried, and prayed, and tried to protect my new baby.
After what seemed like forever, it finally calmed down outside, and we ventured upstairs, to find that our home was covered in glass, and debris, and insulation, and muck, and water. I looked in our backyard, and my heart stopped. Our neighbor's house was literally gone. Totally wiped off the foundation. I told Chris, and he goes, "I don't see anything." Right then, there was a huge flash of lightening that lit up the place. Then we saw the total disaster that everyone would be dealing with. Homes were torn into pieces.
After we got some things together, we went to my aunt Barb's house to recoup and rest up. Meanwhile, our home was being boarded up. It was next to impossible to get out of our neighborhood, because of all of the drive-byers.
It is hard to believe that a tunderstorm can create something poweful enough to wipe homes off of the map. We are so lucky, though. The tornado that hit us was listed as a "very powerful EF3 tornado." The lucky part about it, is that it didn't stay down for very long. If this tornado would have stayed down, many more people would have been out of their homes. Another blessing is that no one was hurt. Like I said, they weren't calling for tornadoes. We were only under a sever thunderstorm warning at the time, and they didn't even admit that it was a tornado that did this damage until almost 2 days later! They claimed that 80 mile an hour "straight line winds" were responsible. My arse. Finally after the National Weather Service came and surveyed the damage, they determined that they were wrong, and that a tornado had, in fact hit our neighborhood. DUH. Anyone who had been in our neighborhood at the time of the tornado could have told you that. 80 mile an hour winds don't sound anything like what we heard that night. It was an awful sound that still makes me sick to my stomach when I think about it.
Now for a PSA. Please don't rely on tornado sirens to alert you to severe weather. The sirens DID NOT go off before our tornado. Get a weather radio, and keep your eye on the news when it looks bad outside. Also, have a plan in place as to where you will go....I know it sounds obvious, but before the tornado Chris and I had never talked about where we would go. We were flying by the seats of our pants that night.
It took about 3 minutes for our house to be shaken to the core, and it took 3 months for us to complete our rebuild. It is crazy what Mother Nature can do when she is pissed off.
