Tornado heading toward loved ones...

[Danny Neal]

You are having the best chase of your life, saw 4 tubes, a wedge, hell even a satellite or two..... Nothing could go wrong! Until you start to notice familiar street/road/town names as you drive along. Suddenly you notice a massive lowering that is almost fail-proof to not produce a killer. It is 15 miles out from home/friends/family and moving in that direction. With all the knowledge we know about chasing/shelter/escape routes etc. I pose these questions...

What are the phone conversations like to your parents, wife, kids, friends, grandparents?

Do you A) - Tell them to get underground, B) Tell them to round up and head out, C) Head to a neighbors, D) Get the camera and batten down the hatches. Basically what is your plan of action for severe weather when you are NOT home? Everyone knows their surroundings in the home life, whether it be hazards, lack of basement, lack of transportation, or a lack of a substantial shelter. I think this could be fun if all participate and I would be very curious to hear of actual stories as I know some of you in the alley HAVE had very close calls in the past with your own homes/loved ones.

In my case, being the closest suburb to the actual city of Chicago, I think everybody may be on top of the situation if a long track violent tornado was developing or was already on the ground, 15 miles out from town. However, the plan of action for all concerned would be to get to the basement as the houses around here (the) majority have basements and are generally 2 story ordinary construction homes with numerous crawl spaces. Running would not be an option, especially during the day time, as city traffic would be crippling. Those of you that remember the 1967 Oak Lawn F4 Tornado know that the main arteries in Oak Lawn at the time were (and still are) 95th and Southwest Highway. 5 PM - Friday afternoon - gridlock -600 yard wide F4 tornado moving at 60+ mph hit that intersection tossing 40 cars and killing 17. Imagine in todays world the consequences of such a storm.

*** Maybe a little more in depth *** What hazards does your area face when hit by a tornado? Do you have a power plant near by? A chemical plant? A train yard? I would be interested in hearing, as a whole, what hazards you and your family would face in a disaster situation that impacts your area!

 

[Joel Wright]

I guess for me it'd depend on how bad the supercell looked. If it were 15 miles out and looked capable of a long-track violent tornado I'd tell them to get out of there and head perpendicular to the track of the storm/tornado. If it were more of the typical weaker type tornado warned storms we see around here I'd tell them just to seek the appropriate shelter.

Of course if a strong tornado were within about 5 miles from family/friends I'd tell them to seek the appropriate shelter and not try to relocate.

Keep in mind we don't have to deal with the severe gridlock in traffic that the Chicagoland area would have to deal with.

 

[Skip Talbot]

I'm also in the Chicago suburbs, and driving away from the tornado is not a good option unless you already happen to be in the car. There are no good vantage points to spot from around here, and the traffic could definitely screw you. So you'd be driving blind and would likely to get stuck somewhere trying to get away in a car. Someplace like Champaign Urbana, however, might be better for driving away. The city is small enough and the roads are good enough that you could probably make a run for it with enough advanced warning. If I had family there and there was a confirmed wedge 15 miles out from town, I might tell them to drop south out of town if they were ready.

 

[Chris Lott]

I remember back in October of 2001, there were a lot of storms firing late in the day, and as day progressed into night it appeared that they would move towards the Central TX area. I really didn't think they would hold together, mainly because it was getting dark and the loss of daytime heating, and just the time of year, but this was a very potent system for October. The other main concern for me was it was a Friday night, and a high school football game was going on. The storms progressed closer and closer to the area, and at the games they have lightning detectors. I can't remember exactly when but the game was stopped due to lightning as the storm got closer, but they would not let the opposing team leave town due to the severity of the storm. I was watching a local channel at home as the storm went tornado warned. By this time both football teams and cheerleaders, band members, etc, had been moved to a local school inside the gym. I continue to watch the local channel as the weather man gives updates, then we lose electricity, and I have no idea what's going on. This is all about 9 at night. A friend of mine calls me and says it's not far from where he is at and the weather is getting bad quick. Another concern that enters my mind, is the town I live in is just off I-35, THE main highway through the middle of Texas, with lots of travelers being it's a Friday, and all who are oblivious to the approaching danger that is no more than five miles to the west of them. After all is said and done, the storm passes to the south of town by probably no more than 1/4 mile, and appeared to lift as it reached I-35 before touching down again on the other side of town. A small community to the west of us received most of the damage, where it was rated a high endF-2/low end F-3 after the damage survey( this was before the enhanced Fujita scale.) After this long story, my main concern would have to be probably to travelers, not to mention family, on such a major highway if a storm was to come again. At that point there is really nothing you can do. What do you do for shelter on a highway? There is nothing you can do. I'm afraid that people would just stop on the highway in panic not knowing what to do.

 

[Scott Weberpal]

"Grab the camera and film until it gets about 100 yard away"

 

[Danny Neal]

"Grab the camera and film until it gets about 100 yard away"

"Danny Jr. get your a$$ in the house this instant!"
"But mooooom it's still 500 yards away!"

 

[Greg Campbell]

"Grab the camera and film until it gets about 100 yard away"

LOL!

My first thought as well: "Activate Option D!"

"Check the film and batteries and remember to focus this time, dammit!!"

 

[cedwards]

This happened to me on May 3, 1999. My then fiancee lived in Tecumseh, OK there was a storm headed that way. I didn't have all the live radar like I do now and heard of a storm heading that way. Every storm so far had produced a tornado and this was was heading for her. I called and told her to get in the closet. She packed up all her beanie babies and filled up the closet with them and there was no room left. It's a good thing she didn't get hit.

 

[Benjamin Rock]

August 28 1990, Plainfield ILL. My mom was at a family friend house when the sky grew dark and the winds picked up. An F-5 bearing down on the town.. I called her to let her know it was coming as my brother and I raced to Plainfield from Hanover Pk, about 30 miles west of Chicago. We could hear the radio screaming about the devastation it was making and the terror it was causing.. All I could say was, " Get under ground NOW!" the phone died and my heart sunk.. As we neared the town, police and emergency vehicles were everywhere. You could see the signs of how strong the tornado was as you approached. Trees were uprooted and houses, gone. The police wouldn't let us drive in to the town so we ditched the car and ran for the the house she was at. As we ran towards it, everything was leveled. We got to where the house should have been and found rumble. Nothing else. Several hours passed and after crying out all the tears I thought I had, there they were, walking towards us. Cut up and bruised but alive. I won't ever forget it.

 

[Shane Adams]

I dealt with this February 10 of this year. I called my mom, gram, and an old friend I went to school with. As usual, my mom was non-chalant about it until I finally convinced her to tune into local TV coverage and she started hearing reports. Fortunately, the tornado passed about 5 miles north of my gram's place (the closest family member to the track), but did some of the F4 damage not far from that portion of the track.

The family-in-peril factor was gut-wrenching enough, but the fact I'd targeted that area early in the day, got suckered away to miss storms in my own backyard, then gave up at dark and went home and not be there to chase that tornado....that made it absolute hell.

I'm fairly confident I'm the only chaser in history who's missed tornadoes in his own backyard and his old stomping grounds on the same day, after being in both areas hours prior to the event. I guess all that's left is to lose my home to a tornado I wasn't there for, which is my biggest chasing fear.

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

This happened to me on May 29, 2008 with the Kearney, Nebraska storm. Both my family and my wife's family all live in Kearney. I'd been following the storm since it was south of Lexington, Nebraska; eventually I got behind it. It didn't seem anywhere near imminent on radar, so I (stupidly) punched through the hook from the west on I-180. After I drove through the wrapping rain curtains, I realized that the storm was maybe a touch closer to producing than I'd thought. I started calling up my fam and my wife's fam. I told them that this was the real deal and that the tornado sirens did not mean what that usually mean in Nebraska, namely "everyone rush outside and look at the approaching storm." Everyone seemed to have already surmised from the look of the sky that this wasn't a "typical" storm and had taken cover.

It was a bit of a close shave; according to one of my parents' crazy neighbors, who ran upstairs to their second story bedroom to watch the approaching storm from a window, a "tiny little tornado" went spinning right down the street my parents live on. I believe it; an apartment building two blocks to the north was heavily damaged, with flipped cars and everything. My mom said her ears popped, and the unlatched north facing kitchen windows (which open outward) actually opened themselves. My wife's fam either caught a separate circulation or the RFD, uprooting trees and blowing out a number of windows in the house. It was a bit of a weird tornado, and from a conversation that I had with Dr. Wurman when he came to give a lecture in Lincoln this year, even the CSWR guys, who intercepted the storm, still aren't entirely sure what the heck was going on on the ground in Kearney. My own guess is that the entire town was inside a "meso on the ground" with the occasional stronger spinup inside the meso.

At any rate, I nearly had a heart attack from the stress of seeing what appeared to be a larrrrge circulation starting to ramp up as the storm went into Kearney. It could have been a lot worse; I kept having visions of Hallam dancing in my head. Fortunately, the town scraped by with sporadic EF-2 damage. I hope for my own sanity I never have to deal with that kind of feeling again.

 

[Dean Baron]

Had to do this on August 8th, 2009. While trying to get on the west metro storm I noticed it was moving northeast towards the northern suburbs. A tornado had already been confirmed so I called my parents and told them to get in the basement. Luckily by the time the storm got to the northern suburbs the tornado had lifted but I watched the large wall cloud pass just a mile or two to the north of the house while chasing the storm through my own town. Definately a different chase.

 

[Danny Neal]

I guess I failed to mention my personal encounter on June 7th, 2008. Many of you know the gist of what happened. The initial warning for Cook County had my house directly in the path. As the storm neared it hit the warm front and turned right and ended up missing my house by a good 15 miles to the south. When that initial warning went up and I saw the report of a wedge on the ground, I immediately placed phone calls to my grandma, my girlfriend, her parents, and a couple other friends that lived in the path and told them to get below ground. Of those people, only one was nearly affected. He lives in Monee and actually lives about a mile or two to the southeast of where Adam Lucio shot his I 57 video. So all in all it worked out for the best in my situation.

 

[David Wolfson]

This thread http://stormtrack.org/forum/showthread.php?t=3234 from 2005 has an interesting discussion of nighttime considerations. Starting at post #22 there's specific discussion around my own experiences on May 9, 2003, north of OKC. No sense repeating it all here, but what it involved was the issue of being mobile and well ahead of an approaching tornadic storm -- whether to shelter or move.

 

[Kevin Myatt]

While we were prepping the vans for the 2008 chase trip, sitting in Dave Carroll's driveway in Blacksburg, Va., I got to test GRLevel 3 watching a supercell with an obvious hook and a meso turning into a TVS headed for my parents' location in northeast Arkansas (this was the same outbreak that later produced the Stuttgart, Ark. tornado that the TIV/DOW team intercepted). It eventually produced confirmed tornadoes about 5 miles to their south. I was on the phone with them just before it came through; they got a lot of wind and hail out of it. The next day, on our trip west, one of the North Carolina-Asheville students in our van went through the same experience watching a tornadic supercell on radar approaching her parents' home in Charlotte, NC. I think one of her friends actually saw the tornado ... and provided obligatory ribbing about why she had to travel west for tornadoes when they were in her own backyard. But that did turn out to be a very big trip for us more than a week later in Kansas.