On Thursday, I had my first "Tornado Warning" while living in Arkansas.
The
weather people here can't predict the weather. They get really excited
about these spring storms, but they are so unpredictable that you just
have to wait and see what happens. And while we were in a moderate risk
all day long, nothing happened around us. The air was humid and
soupy. It was awful feeling. But no storms. As the day went on, more
storms came through north of us and I thought we just might get away
with not having anything.
But I was wrong. I was asleep for
about an hour when the loud thunder woke me up. The lightening was
crazy. The sky was constantly lighting up. Julie woke up about this
time and was so scared. I grabbed her and tucked her into bed with us
so she would feel better. As we started to relax, I heard sirens.
Which I figured were the tornado sirens people had told me about them.
It surprised me because I thought they were piercing loud-like a fire
alarm. Surprisingly, they were sort of quiet and not high pitched like I
imagined.
Anyways, I did remain calm, but told Justin that maybe we should turn on TV and see if there was a tornado near us. He was half asleep and responded, "It's raining out. If there was a tornado, it wouldn't be raining." Ah, he's so comforting.
After some prodding, we all got up and saw that the "rotation" was headed this way. See?
We were in the path! I was ready to go to our "safe place" but luckily
the rotation fell apart before it came near us. But after that fell
apart, we got a severe thunderstorm warning. It said that it would be
here around 12:57am. And at 12:55, our power went out. Which probably
meant the storm was here. It was still so crazy out there. That
thunder was so loud! I tried to get a video of the thunder and
lightning together but you can mostly just see the rain pouring off our
roof.
With all the thunder I didn't realize that it was super windy out. A
wind gust brought a lot of rain inside the house! I got soaked with
the rain. Or else I would have tried to get a better video. This one
would have to do.
I grabbed our lantern/flashlight which delighted Julie. She was in love with that thing and using it all over the house! We headed back to bed and I hoped the power would come back soon. And it was back on in about 2 hours. I was shocked. That was fast.
Meanwhile, Jax slept through the whole commotion. I have no idea how he could do that.
As I was driving Jax to school the following morning, we drove by this on our road. This is about 3 houses down from us. It used to be a corner of a pretty tall fence.
Lots of trees were down around town. But our town did not receive the worst damage at all. Towns south of us got the straight line winds that clocked up to 85mph! That's just crazy.
After my first experience with this spring storm, I think I do almost prefer the tornado warning over the unknown of earthquakes. I grew up living in a earthquake zone and had been in a handful of minor earthquakes. But we never knew when they would shake. At least with this storm, we knew exactly when this storm would come and where it was at pretty much at all times. That was pretty handy.