"Being in a Tornado Got Me Started Chasing"

[Scott Bell]

May 4, 1977 an F3 tornado decided to visit my house. As a 5 year old, this storm, which bulldozed through the middle of Sedalia, MO, (yes, the same Sedalia that was a target in 2007) destroyed houses throughout our neighborhood, took all of the windows out of our house, huge trees up and down the street, the garage in our backyard, a school a few blocks away was severely damaged.

May 12, 1980 a second F3 parallels the path of the first a few miles to the nortwest, this time hitting the industrial park and other sections of town.



These two events left a huge impression on me, and I still get that rush of adrenaline when severe thunderstorms roll into town, the sky turns that greenish color. Back then, it was more fear, but obviously, that turned into a fascination with them. Though it wasn't until I saw the article about tornado chasing in National Geographic that I realized fools actually went out chasing them. I volunteered to join in on a chase vacation with a couple of members from ST, and that was the beginning of the downfall so to speak.

 

[Dennis Dennison]

Well, as the guy who got this rolling under Palm Sunday tornado's. I guess maybe I should have started a new post? Great stories of how you all got involved with tornado's, weather, chasing-thanks for sharing

 

[Sam Kennedy]

I was interested in Hurricanes before I became interested in Tornadoes. I was 3 was watching the news because A hurricane had blown down a petrol station. When I was four I first saw a tornado in one of the "I wonder why" books about weather. Since then I have always liked to watch and learn about tornadoes.

 

[Jason Caster]

When I was 6 or 7, a tornado touched down just outside of Merrill, OR. Living only a few miles away in Klamath Falls, I remember my parents talking about it and wondering if it would come our way. It never did, but the next day we took a drive out to see the damage. Seeing very large uprooted trees instilled a sense of fear in me, and afterwords I had many dreams of a tornado coming over the hill towards our house. They were always huge in my dreams, much larger than any actual tornado.

As I grew older, the fear turned to curiousity, but we never had much more than some small hail out in Southern Oregon. I started doing research online a few years ago, and finally planned a trip last year. Only saw a tornado at night, which still photos from video proved. It was too hard to see a clear picture at night. So my curiousity is still extreme, and I'll definitely plan more trips in the future.

 

[Stephen Levine]

Childhood Tornado, Adult Chasing

I guess I am the exception here. When I was a child, I had zero experiences with tornadoes.
However, despite growing up in a region that almost never got tornadoes (SW PA), and where nobody ever talked about them (nor mentioned them on the radio), I had a profound inner fascination with them.

As early as age 5, I found myself meditating on the types of structures that tornadoes had, and doing so with fascination. Nobody told me about this nor did I read about this at such a young age in the 1950's.

In addition, as a child, I felt a particular fascination and kinesthetic knowing of familiarity when playing with the battery powered toys that would bump into furniture then turn around and go a different direction. The underside of this toy had a large, flat rotating cylinder under which hung three wheels. The cylinder would rotate when the toy hit the furniture or wall, the wheels would keep the toy rolling in a different direction. Turning the toy upside down and looking at this structure gave me a familiar sense of awe and wonder.
Many decades later I learned that this structure must have somehow subconsciously reminded me of the rotating wall cloud with rotating vortexes underneath!

By third grade, I was drawing exquisite pictures of tornadoes and fields with fences, and by 5th grade, my first "Arrow" scholastic book was one about tornadoes.

Also, by 5th grade, I watched my first TV version of "The Wizard of Oz". Of course the tornado was one of my very favorite parts, and I always hoped the first part of the movie would hurry up so that I could finally get to see the tornado.

Living in the hilly terrain of SW PA, we were lucky to get no more than one or two "severe" storms in a year; hail was rare and I never saw a funnel cloud till I was 15 and most certainly never saw a tornado. Nobody talked about them in school, nobody predicted them on the radio - yet the awe and wonder about tornadoes lived within me.

 

[DHobbs]

I also went through my first tornado at 5 when my hometown was struck by an unwarned tornado in Apr. 1973. There had been other tornadoes that day all around us but ours arrived after dark. They were showing a hook echo on a storm that was on top of us on the 10:00 news and storm spotters in the county to the west saw it but we still weren't warned. It was a miracle that no one was killed and very few were injured considering it was rated F-3 but should have been rated F-4 in my opinion since a suction spot completely destroyed a home just next door to us and another house just outside of town that was on a hill. In an aerial photo you can just barely make out the swaths that the multiple vortices caused. I rode it out in bed and I still remember the t.v. antennae outside my window play a strange tune as the wind speed outside increased, the breaking windows, and my window flying across my room as the wall was destoyed. To this day I still don't sleep through storms at night and I have studied severe weather on my own since then. I should have went to college for meteorology instead of a useless business degree but I enjoy helping out with my local storm spotters and learning more about the science of severe weather.

 

[Keith Wilson]

When I was 5 or 6 (1969 or 70), I heard the Paducah, KY sirens during an intense storm for the first time and it scared the hell out of me. Dad was freaking out, loaded us in the truck, and drove us under an overpass a couple of miles away. Hail was beating the truck and Dad had to drive super slow. A tornado was reported along the river about a mile away and Dads work lost it's roof.

A second event in '73 or '74 really solidified my interest in the weather. My family was primitive camping (in a tent) on the east side of Kentucky Lake. That night we watched a highly electrical storm approach across the lake from the SW. When the storm hit us it was violent. Large waves sank our boat and lightning was popping the trees all around us. We stayed in the tent until it started hailing and we finally climbed into the truck. When the hail broke the windshield Dad decided to try to get us out of there, but the truck couldn't get up the slick hill.
Dad pulled back to the campsite and we sat and watched as the storm destroyed our camp. I'll never forget the moment that it suddenly got much quieter and we could then here the "roar" coming from the lake. Dads window was facing the lake, so he rolled it down since it was fogged up from the four of us crammed in the truck. The roar was from a large tornado (technically a waterspout) coming across the lake towards us, lit up by vivid lightning. Dad rolled the window back up and we all huddled together, expecting to die I guess. Luckily, it lifted before it hit us, but touched back down as the roar resumed on the other side of the hill behind us. The road was blocked by trees, so we were stuck there for a few more days.
I have been addicted to storms ever since.

 

[Mike Johnston]

What is it about age 5 that shapes so many of our influences from the weather?

Anyway, I was also 5 years old growing up in Wichita, KS (this would haved placed it in 1965) when the tornado sirens went off at night. My dad and the dad of our next door neighbors, being still young and adventurous themselves, decided to load both families up in the car and drive out to see what was going on. When I think of it, there must have been 8 people, including 4 children, in the car which seems crazy. We drove out to a spot near the airport, which was on the southwest edge of town. All I remember was that our neighbor's dad said "yes, I think I see one" and then we were overtaken by dust swirls and strong winds. Neither of us had basements, so my dad decided to speed down the road to go to a casual friends' house whom we knew had a basement. The poor folks were obviously awoken from their sleep and startled by our sudden appearance on their front door step, but graciously invited us in and it seemed like forever we stayed in their basement. No damage or anything, but it was quite a memory.

A couple of years later, we were out at a shopping mall when the tornado sirens sounded again and all the patrons were ushered downstairs. This one was real and hit the northeast part of Wichita and I'll never forget touring the damaged part of the city the next day and seeing all the uprooted trees.

Then, in third grade, there must have been some storm education effort going on. We were shown a brief film about a tornado hitting a ficticious small Kansas town. At the climax of the drama, a farmer and his wife were looking out the window, spotted a tornado, and frantically called it in over one of those real, real old crank phones at which point the town was duly warned but got destroyed nontheless. I guess all this was meant to teach us about tornado warnings, but mainly it just scared the wits out of us.

Many, many other "close calls" back in the 60's and 70's growing up in Wichita. It seemed like tornadoes, the threat of tornadoes, and severe thunderstorms were just kind of a fact of life. In particular, the area I lived in seemed to kind of be in one of those "local alleys" where the storms would maybe first be reported around the Haysville area and then move northeast from there, usually on a track uncomfortably close to us in a neighborhood called Springdale. (As a matter of fact, years after I had moved away from Wichita, the famous Andover tornado took exactly this path.) Our house was on the southwest edge of the neighborhood, and there were nothing but open fields to the west, so we always had a great backyard view as the storms were coming in.

Naturally, I took up an interest in severe weather as a teenager. I checked out from the library Snowden Flora's book about historical tornado accounts and it was downright spooky. Not alot of hard meteorological info, but some great accounts.

Sometime later, in the month of May of my senior year of college, I was taking the CPA exam. We were on the 2nd floor of some campus building at Wichita State University. The room was surrounded on 3 sides with nothing but plate glass windows to the outside. In the middle of the 2nd day of the exam, the sky turned as black as I'd ever seen, the winds howled and the sirens were blaring. But, for whatever reason I don't know to this day, the monitors kept us in the exam and the clock was ticking. I was obviously unnerved, and this being the most important exam of my life, the pressure was on. Fortunately, I found out in the mail a few weeks later I had passed all 4 parts of this exam, but it was an experience I'll never forget.

Nowadays, don't see alot of action here in South Carolina, but I do love to chase when I can - which is usually when I go back and stay with family in Kansas City, Wichita, Pittsburg KS, or Springfield MO.

 

[Alex Heimberger]

A quick write up of my exprence in a tornado. Always was interested, but this did help. Original post: http://www.tornadotitans.com/your-first-tornado-share-your-story/

My first tornado happened Aug. 25th 1998. I was living in SW Michigan(born & raised). I was only 12 years young & still remember it like yesterday. This was a nocturnal event that took place.

I woke to thunder & flashes of lightning. My mother & I loved watching storms. Many times one(or both) of us would get woken by them in late hot summer nights. Knowing my mother would love to sit out on the porch with me & watch this spectacle I started towards her room. We had a window fan (small two fan contraption) that was blowing I believe air into the house. Soon as I got to her door & quietly told her to “get up there’s a storm”, the window fan started indicting something was wrong.

The fans began to slow down. Eventually at one point stopping. You could here the motors wincing. This struck me as odd. No sooner to have this thought it stared blowing air out the other way we had it set for. It was upon us! The noises were loud & unforgiving. I knew exactly what it was.

The tornado came from the back of the house. exactly where we had to run for the basement steps. Our house was built on a hill. So the back looked two story with the basement having a door to the backyard. Just before reaching the basement steps, out the window looking out to our backyard a huge explosion light up the alley behind the house. A power flash from a transformer & poll crashing to the ground. Both of our ears where popping as we made it to the basement. It was an intense moment, backing up my thoughts that this is a tornado & will change this night as I know it forever. It sounded like the world outside our house was breaking apart.

Not much time passed after reaching the basement was this climax to this event being over. Everything was eerily quiet. Still breathing hard & adrenaline pumping we opened the door to the outside from our basement. It looked like a war zone. Trees down, telephone polls/wires littering the alley, pieces of shingles & buildings speared throughout. The neighborhood looked the same. One of our trees was twisted out from the stump giving it a sharpen pencil like shape. Our house only had minor damage.

Didn’t get much sleep the rest of that night lol. Also, this event happened the day before my 1st day of school for that grade. It Started late that year. We check on neighbors. Everyone was okay. The next day I recorded some of the damage around our house. Shakiest video anyone’s ever made I now wonder if my mom still has the footage somewhere on vhs. No casualties came from the initial tornado. Later though a police officer would pass because of a live wire during clean up…

My first tornado was an epic one. Though I truly didn’t see it, I witnessed what it can do firsthand at an early age. I’ve witnessed waterspouts before this living so close to Lake Michigan. But this was my first tornado & has help ignite my flame to see more.