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A Truly Terrifying Experience

Chipk

Elite Member
Joined
Mar 18, 2013
Messages
3,314
Location
Jacksonville / Yulee Florida
A truly terrifying experience. A TRUE story.

Growing up in NE Florida I was experienced in hurricanes and severe lightning storms.

But I was totally a novice with tornados. In fact I didn’t believe we even had tornados here. But about 10 years ago a woman who worked with me reported her son had called to tell her they were having a tornado at their house. When she asked how he knew he said a cat just flew past his window.

And yes, they had minor tornado damage.

Once I was mesmerized to see a water spout traveling down the St John’s river. Last year a tornado missed our house by a few hundred yards. It knocked down countless trees and damaged a number of roofs. Most amazing were the number of large trampolines carried off and dumped randomly in our area.

Last year during the Hurricane Irma, a tornado hit our neighbor’s house at 5am. It tore off a massive sunroom and half of his metal roof while flattening nearly a dozen of his oak trees. It then knocked down 4 of our trees and dumped his roof in our yard creating a massive mess for me to clean up. It also trapped us for 2 days until the trees were removed.

Well yesterday I was metal detecting when suddenly the winds really picked up. Also heavy rain clouds blackened the sky. Realizing rain was about to dampen my day, I started walking towards my Jeep. However I had not gone far when my detector had a strong signal of what may be a good target.

I can’t say it was the smart thing to do, but I stopped and knelt down to dig the signal. As I removed yet another blasted bottlecap from Mother Earth, I heard it.

Every description of a tornado I have ever heard included the sound of an approaching train. And that was exactly what I was hearing as the winds increased and the rain began to fall. I stood up and looked around trying to determine where twister was so I could either run or hunker down where I was. The direction of the sound was hard to determine as it was bouncing off of the nearby houses and the many trees. I was getting truly worried about my predicament.

And then when I looked over my shoulder I saw IT. IT was right behind me. There through the trees I saw the tracks I had not noticed before and the 3:17 train barreling along on them!!!

It seems that a tornado is not the only thing that sounds like an approaching train. An approaching train also sounds like an approaching train....or a tornado.

Shortly after that the winds died down and the sun came out.
 
HaHa Funny story.

I'm from Kansas and there's been a lot of tornadoes in my time. The worst anywhere near me was the Joplin MO tornado. Even after seeing all the various news reports I was prepared for what I was to see when I went there a month or more afterward. What a mess.

I have seen a small one near here but thankfully none really severe.
 
I have seen a number of them here in Kansas. One went right through a local park after damaging my ex-wife's house. It tore up the tot lot and they since moved it to another area. Here when they give warnings people go outside to watch. I have found that it is a good time to hunt parks because they are usually empty of people. I think the first one I remember was the Udall tornado that about wiped out the town. There have been several bad ones since them. The Greensburg tornado and another one that went through part of Wichita and Andover come to mind.
 
I went to school at OU in Norman OK. They had us stay in an 11 story building shaped like an X. If we heard the tornado alarms go off we were to go to the center of the building in case the "wings" blew off
 
The fury of nature is impressive beyond words. Tornadoes are terrifying in a way Hurricanes are not. You know when a Hurricane is coming days in advance. Tornadoes can just appear, or not. When conditions are right, you have to suffer the fear of a potential tornado, or experience the fear of an actual one. Nothing in their (unpredictable) path remains standing. While it is an outlier in terms of "your average tornado", the El Reno tornado was 2.7 miles wide and was packing ~300mph winds - that is just plain terrifying.
 
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