Sleeping soundly early this morning, I heard a persistent banging on my door.
I jumped out of bed, grabbed my nightie, raced to open it! My neighbor from upstairs in my apartment building was alerting me that in 8 minutes a tornado warning on the local TV said our village was in its path.
From sleeping sound, to getting downstairs in the basement until the threat had passed I-
Threw on clothes
used the bathroom
grabbed my glasses
pulled my two IMPORTANT folders from the cabinet (birth certificates, family death certs, will, living will, DNR papers, Power of Attny, )
my purse (drivers license, SS card, credit cards)
cell phone
wrist watch (in case the power lines were down and satellite towers gone)
raced downstairs to be sure other tenants were there and safe)
All this in five minutes flat!! Need I say that we stayed in one laundry room in the basement for 30 minutes, set up chairs from my storage bins for two gals with canes, monitoring weather radar on cell phone until the alert ended, making jokes, and seeing each other just rolled out of bed! Altogether, not the best sight but I covered by saying I was Pam’s ordinary sister, and her pretty self was upstairs still in bed. I didn’t have my eyebrows penciled in, so I hope they believed me.
What a way to start the day! Has anyone else had this jarring experience? It made me feel better knowing I could move this fast in an emergency.
All of this excitement will surely make me relax for the rest of the day. Whew!!
Closest I had to having to jump out of bed in calamity mode was when a petrol tanker came down the embankment, flew over my garden hedge, ploughed through my front garden and landed on top of next doors car parked in their drive.
I’m not a perky person when I first wake, more like a zombie film extra … so struggled to figure out was happening as a fire engine came screaming down the road incase the tanker leaked or ignited.
@RightNow … I admire your nerve … no way could I live in the States in danger of hurricanes and tornadoes.
Having survived inside our Sussex costal house while a tornado passed directly overhead, it made good reading that you had a warning. We had none! I grabbed my wife and we sheltered inside a large wardrobe as tiles and other building debris etc fell all around.
I moved out of my bedroom into the small single bed at the front of the house because a storm came in and was hitting the bedroom window and banging it , I was afraid the glass would burst through .
Phew! Glad all is well now…never had to deal with anything like that (yet) but I will take a lesson from you @RightNow and have things within grabbing distance!
I was only a kid, but we often had to go over to the communal air
raid shelter when Jerry was trying to obliterate us during WW2 !!
Sometimes we stayed there all night !
Our only communication was by air raid siren !!
Donkeyman!
The winds got stiffer and sterner and they gave them names… and whilst I ambled down the road wrapped up warm, what I thought was tree branches creaking and groaning under the buffeting of the wind named Denis or Edith turned out to be my own joints.
Danny, I live in upstate New York. Two days ago we had snow showers. I’m used to blizzards and snow squalls, but not tornados. A different kind of wake up call for me.
Yeah you in the upper northeast don’t get tornados hardly at all. Like here in Denver, CO. If it makes you feel any better: @RightNow Nevertheless, over the past five years, roughly seven out of 10 tornado warnings have been false alarms.Apr 6, 2021
Yeah, absolutely no warning. One huge clap of thunder and several lightning strikes before seconds later the twister struck land and then the devastation happened.
[quote=“Danny, post:15, topic:86558”]
What percent of tornado watches become warnings?
[/quote]We have had about 7 or so watches in the last three years. I can only recall three times that it changed to a warning for us in this immediate area.
Edited to say…after reading your statistics, my memory is pretty accurate.
After all is said and done here, I am patting myself on the back that I acted so quickly without time to think or plan. Just amazed at myself. You can’t change some things like a tornado, but things you have control over, act on it!
Now, I hope my elbow isn’t strained from all of this nonsense.
A major problem where we used to live was water spouts heading north eastwards up the Solent into The Channel. A slight change in the wind direction and the spout touches land to become a tornado. We no longer live in that location
