Tornadoes

[The 777 Hoax]

Holy crap. The other day, when I was out of town for the day at a church activity, I came home to find trees down, power lines down, and houses damaged. There was a tornado right by my house.

Luckily, the only damage we had was a few branches in our yard and gutter broke.

Tornadoes scare the crap out of me because when my dad was a baby, there was a tornado that totally destroyed houses in their neighborhood. I have nightmares about them a lot.

Does anyone else have any experience with tornadoes?

 

[GenMarshall]

None for I live in an area that does not foster tornatoes (IE, not the right conditions)

 

[Tycoon101]

As Civgeneral said, I don't live near a tornado area.

 

[bhsup]

Not any direct experience with any hitting my home or anything, but we get them here.

The worst single day I recall was back in 1977 when I was in 4th grade. Later, I learned that there were 36 tornadoes across Missouri that day. A high school in a nearby town had the roof completely torn off of its gymnasium, I saw cows on the trip home laying in fields with bones protruding from their bodies, and more than one house on the way home was pretty banged up.

Unrelated to tornadoes, but freaky because it happened on the night that the movie Twister debuted, was a microburst that hit...er, either southern Lee's Summit or Raintree Lake, I cannot recall which city now. Some folks returned from seeing the movie to find their homes utterly destroyed.

 

[The 777 Hoax]

You guys are lucky. (CG and Tycoon)

 

[Tycoon101]

You guys are lucky. (CG and Tycoon)

Being near the coast really helps. The rainy and cold conditions are very helpful in deterring tornadoes too.

 

[skadistic]

Twisters here are very rare but micro-bursts happen alot. Every so often A toranado will hit and its bad news. Every time a good sized storm comes this way a part of my mind dreads what might happen.

Micro-bursts are tiny little torrnados that hit hard for a second or two and cover very little ground. Mostly they just mess up trees and pop power lines and junction boxes. Although I have seen one flip a car over from out of no where and disapear.

 

[bhsup]

Microbursts aren't really tornadoes. They are straight-line winds whereas tornados are rotating columns of wind.

What you're talking about, a tiny tornado, might be what I've always heard referred to as a dust devil.

 

[tombeef]

My county usually gets 2-3 tornado warnings a year, but there hasn't been a really bad twister here for a while. The whole of southwest Michigan can get some, they're not rare, but it's not like Oklahoma or Kansas or anything.

 

[BCLG100]

the biggest ive ever seen are them dust swirls.

 

[Yeeek]

Never seen a tornado and there is never any tornadoes around here thankfully. But after watching documentaries about them i can frankly say they would scare me a lot.

Its just so huge, you must feel so helpless when you see one.

 

[Chairman Meow]

I live in a very hilly area, and if anyone ever tells you that hills prevent tornadoes from forming (which seems to be a common myth), they're wrong... in '98, there was an F4 tornado that went across the next hill from where my house is. That was quite a fun night.

And I'm going to Oklahoma next month... Wish me luck.

 

[madviking]

Meh, the worst I ever seen was penny sized hail.

 

[downtown]

Ohio is on the edge of the US "Tornado Alley". We get a few in my neck of the woods every summer, although one has only touched down in my town once. That was a mess.

The worst was when I was camping, and one hit. I had to hide under a bridge for two hours, and I could see tents flying in the wind. Scary stuff!

 

[Dreadnought]

I live in NJ, not a tornado area. But they seem scary

 

[Red Door]

We have one every couple of years, a couple of years ago a huge one wrecked La Plata, Maryland, and I remember there being one in Annadale, Virginia a few years back.

 

[Bluemofia]

Near Chicago, so we have tornadoes every once in a while.

A while ago, we had a tornado, but I was somewhere else, and didn't see it. I don't think it did much damage though.

 

[YNCS]

During the past ten years, every U.S. state and Canadian province has had tornadoes.

 

[Drewcifer]

Most of the tornados we get in Minnesota are small ones that hit the ground a couple of times without doing much damage. There are exceptions though, there was a town in the western part of the state that was wiped off the map by an F-5 ten to fifteen years ago (Comfrey?). Northfield, MN was hit pretty hard a few years ago by a tornado that was over a mile wide and had multiple vortexes.

There are some days where you don't have to wait for the media to tell you you are under a tornado watch, you can tell just by looking at the sky. I have never seen a tornado but I have been within a few miles of a tornadic storm a couple of times. The sky around these storms or the strong non-tornadic ones can be an amazing sight to see; surreal, dramatic, fearsome and beautiful all together. It makes me think of the Wizard of Oz. Often they come just before sunset.

 

[Heretic_Cata]

Tornadoes never existed in the recorded history (IIRC) of where i am.... untill now that is ... Last year just a few stronger winds blowing roofs away, this year F1 tornadoes ... who knows what will happen next year...
But personaly i never seen one.