Your First Tornado

[NancyM]

The first (and only) tornado I've seen is the April 1966 F3 "White Tornado" in Overland Park, Kansas. I saw it through a window at school as we were going to a lower level. Things could have been much worse considering the timing with schools letting out.

http://www.jocohistory.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/alb/id/393/rec/2

I could have seen one in Jan 1967 if I'd looked out the door when my father did, but I was racing down the stairs to the basement. This was an F4 in St. Louis County, MO. It was about 1 mile west of us when my father saw it and destroyed a neighborhood 1/2 mile north of us.

 

[Matt Salo]

My first tornado was July 18th, 1986 - Brooklyn Park / Fridley, MN. It was 4 miles from the house I lived in at the time, and was standing out in the front yard watching it for 30+ minutes, beginning to end. The entire lifecycle of this tornado was filmed and broadcast live from a news helicopter. This is the tornado that took me from deathly afraid of severe weather, to completely obsessed with it.

http://www.minnpost.com/politics-po...tornado-made-broadcasting-history-twin-cities

 

[ScottCurry]

My first tornado was in November of 1995 in Turkey (the country, not Turkey, TX). I was a Junior in High School, on a bus traveling from Ankara to Incirlik. We were traveling south on E90 and the tornado was to the west. I didn't have a camera on me, so no photos. It was the only tornado to hit Turkey that year, and 1995 was the last year that Turkey only got 1 tornado (in 2013, they got almost 60). The tornado was not rated as tornados were so rare (never more than 1 per year prior to 1996), Turkish Meteorological Services did not forecast them or investigate them. The tornado was very different from the tornados I've seen here in the United States. The cloud base was very high and there was no wall cloud. It was just a funnel cloud and a tornado in an otherwise normal looking storm.

Here is a photo of a tornado in France that looks very similar to the tornado I saw in Turkey:
http://strangesounds.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/tornado-rodez-France-august-2014.jpg

If you are interested in learning more about tornados in Turkey, here is a good article:
http://www.academia.edu/7311470/Tornado_climatology_of_Turkey

I feel blessed to have seen what was at that time one of the rarest tornados on earth. I moved from Turkey to Alabama in 1996 and saw my fair share of Tornados during the 1997 season. If you are wondering, I am an American military brat. We lived on an American military base in Incirlik, Turkey where I attended my Junior year of high school at a DoDDS School.

 

[Robert Forry]

No photos or video of my first as my wife and I were caught totally off guard back in August 27th, 2003 south of Jackson, MS while on our way to NO for the Labor Day holiday weekend, and my wife's birthday. We were driving in one of those late summer thunderstorms in the South. You know the ones... Large CAPE, PW values over 2, and raining at more than 2 inches/hour. We had just gotten gas at the Yazoo City exit off I-55, and we were in what I thought was just a bad squall. Turns out we were in the precip core of a cell that contained a small tornado. It got so bad with the wind, at 70 MPH it felt like we were doing 5 with the headwind that was rocking our car. We pulled off the roadway just in time as the wind changed directions from head on, to from the due east. It was rain wrapped, but we saw the funnel clearly (not so clearly) condensated all the way to the ground from a distance of a hundred yards. My first trip to the Bears Cage. It knocked down a small patch of the pine trees that lined either side of the road. With its crossing, and our exit from the RFD core, the sun came out, and we continued on our way.

The SPC shows only a wind and hail report from that day which is surprising to me. Had we called it in maybe that would have been different.

I kick myself for not having a camera ready. Of course, I never leave home without it today.

 

[Royce Sheibal]

Was '91 or '92, I think. Cone Tornado (which I later found out to be an F2) dropped just south of the Iowa Western Campus, where I was for the yearly Ren-Fair. Hot day, sky turned bright green. We got out of there just in time, the tornado set down on the other side of I-80 and I watched out the back window of my dad's Camero as he floored it the hell out of there. Probably the #1 reason why I got into weather and chasing.

 

[Chris Dickerson]

My first tornado was #44 on Fujita's famous map of the April 3, 1974 Super Outbreak. This F-4 tornado struck the northern suburbs of Cincinnati, OH when I was eight years old. It was preceded immediately by the more famous Saylor Park F-5 that tore through the western part of the city. My family and I were scared out of our wits that warm, balmy afternoon, and we had already heard about the deadly Xenia, OH F-5. For some reason my mom thought it would be a good idea to go out to a nearby restaurant in the northeastern suburb of Montgomery, and when the restaurant's manager opened the blinds we saw the Mason tornado about four miles off to our northwest (I was already a stickler for proper positioning). The power went out, the manager herded us into the restaurant's basement, and the rest is history. I was hooked.

My first "chase" tornado was also historic: the mile-wide F-4 beast that destroyed Hallam, NE on 5/22/04.

Wow... I grew up in Mason, Ohio (though I didn't live there until 1988). I was there for the June 2nd, 1990 outbreak that produced a tornado roughly a mile from my house. A few years back, I found some old photos from the 1974 Super Outbreak tornado that appeared in the local paper. Even though my neighborhood wasn't built in 1974, there was severe devastation right across the street as the street sign was still standing in front of some demolished homes. Even though it's logistically impossible, if I had lived in the same place when the 74 tornado struck, it would have hit my house dead-on.

 

[ScottCurry]

My first tornado was July 18th, 1986 - Brooklyn Park / Fridley, MN. It was 4 miles from the house I lived in at the time, and was standing out in the front yard watching it for 30+ minutes, beginning to end. The entire lifecycle of this tornado was filmed and broadcast live from a news helicopter. This is the tornado that took me from deathly afraid of severe weather, to completely obsessed with it.

http://www.minnpost.com/politics-po...tornado-made-broadcasting-history-twin-cities

Maybe it's just a pet peeve of mine, but this kind of reporting bothers me. Why does every tornado have to be described as "deadly", "extremely large", or "incredibly dangerous"? I undertand TV stations reporting that during a live event to get people to take the situation seriously or perhaps just to get more TV ratings, but 25 years later!? REALLY!?

"What followed was 25 minutes of a live chase of a deadly tornado."

and then later in the article...

"Remarkably, there were no injuries or deaths and damage was limited."

I know this is not the right thread to rant, and I know this has been discussed 100 times before, but I just had to get that off my chest.