//WRESTLING WITH THE WIND//
Hooray! It’s tornado season! Time for turning keen eyes to the sky, listening for the sound of sirens and getting ready to duck and cover! Park your car somewhere safe, stow your patio furniture and barbecue grills, bring your pets inside and grab a flashlight. Make sure you have your insurance agent’s home phone number, because you’ll never reach him at the office. Don’t worry about flipping your mattress – you’ll get to do that when you drag it into the hallway for protection.
I’ve lived in this corner of Tornado Alley for almost 20 years. Yet I’ve had serious brushes with tornadoes only three times. If you’ve ever faced such a storm, or if you’ve seen that “Twister” movie with the windblown Helen Hunt, you know how sudden and randomly violent the damage can be.
I was working at a grocery store during my first tornado experience, on Mother’s Day, May 9, 1992. Sundays were busy at the store, and the observed “holiday” made it even more hectic. However, I was able to break away long enough to have lunch with Mom and Dad.
We weren’t watching TV during our meal and were oblivious to the tornado warning. The sky looked a little greenish, but it was probably just another spring thunderstorm. While driving driving back to the store after lunch, I saw emergency vehicles clustered around downed power lines and large tree limbs. When I entered the parking lot, I noticed much more going on.
The Eckerd drug store next door was missing its front facade. The gas station on the corner had lost its roof. The Subway sandwich shop – once the town’s Dairy Queen – was on the verge of collapse. The McDonald’s, where I’d worked my first job, now had less of a play area and a severely twisted ‘M” for a sign. The empty hospital building had lost many of its windows, and white blinds dangled outside.
A crowd had gathered in front of the grocery store. A station wagon was flipped upside down and crammed under the awning above the other entrance. Other cars were strewn like toys parked by a spoiled 5-year-old. Inside, the damage was not as noticeable. A few sections of roof were torn off, and trash cans were catching some of the water drips. Some of the front glass was shattered, but no one had been hurt. I tried calling home – this in an era before everyone and their dogs had cell phones – but the lines were tied up by others’ frantic dialing. My dad drove to the store when he encountered the same busy signal and was obviously happy to see me unhurt.
I had just missed it. One less dinner roll with Mom would have stuck me in the middle of it all.
Two of the grocery sackers were helping customers to their cars when the cloud first appeared. They came running inside yelling “Tornado!” There was a split second during which the cashiers and customers up front thought it was a joke. But the punchline came in the form of a thundering black cloud sounding like a runaway sky train, jumping its track and aiming fury at whatever wasn’t nailed down. Witnesses at the scene said there was a lot of screaming, the power went out for a minute, and then all was quiet. That story would be recounted on the local news by a few of my friends and co-workers.
Helicopter-bound news cameras would trace the path of the storm – possibly multiple tornadoes – as it first hit a mobile home park, plowed through the grocery store parking lot, into Eckerd, along the “restaurant row” of the gas station/ice cream store, Subway, a drive-thru bank, McDonald’s, Taco Delite, Sonic and then disappearing. The storm turned near the downtown area, mowing over a few of the houses east of it, continuing north through some trees, then ripping shingles off houses in a newer neighborhood. One of the marinas at the lake lost a roof as it collapsed on top of the boats underneath.
In the wake of the chaos, one fatality was discovered. The man was napping at home alone in his trailer when the strong wind gently rolled the unsecured single-wide on its side. He was crushed by objects in his own living room.
A print shop in town capitalized on the mayhem with “I survived the Mother’s Day tornado” T-shirts. However, because the dead man’s wife worked in the cafeteria at the high school, the tasteless apparel was quickly banned from there.
My second brush with a tornado was less traumatic and is worth only a brief mention. I was a recent college grad working for slave-type wages as a reporter/photographer at a tiny daily newspaper. My roommate and I lived in a duplex a mile from the downtown area. I had my police scanner on and was listening to storm-spotters from the sheriff’s department.
Once again, the sky was green. It had hailed a bit earlier. He had a flashlight, I held my nervous chihuahua. A large funnel cloud was spotted over the junior college, which happened to be next door. We heard the runaway sky train, but it never dropped in for a visit.
We emerged unscathed, but still, it was a close shave.
I’d sworn off living in small towns for a while by the time my third tornado blew by. I worked in downtown Fort Worth at the city’s major newspaper. It was after 6 p.m., and I was moving my car from its metered spot several blocks away to a neared berth for a faster getaway after work.
I was a few steps from my car when the tornado sirens sounded. The wind had picked up, the sky was dark. I walked faster toward the relative safety of my desk.
However, that desk was on a “bridge” over the street that stretched between the original newspaper office and an annex. A staff photographer had been on the roof snapping photos of the storm when she saw an approaching funnel cloud. She ran back to the newsroom and announced frantically that a tornado “was headed right for us.”
The order came for everyone to “get off the bridge” while I was on the phone with my wife. She was in our closet with the phone, a flashlight and our two dogs. She was worried because the sky was green and the wind was frenzied. Her worries were not eased by the fact that I told her “I have to go right now” and hung up. By the time we left the bridge, the order came for everyone to head downstairs to the unused press room in the basement.
We stayed in the windowless confines of the press room for what seemed like forever, but it was less than 30 minutes. Several of us decided to see what was outside. Glass, insulation, stray pieces of buildings and broken cars littered the streets. A taller building a block away had lost most of its windows. We’d find out later that an historic church and a few other office buildings on the edge of town suffered serious damage – enough that they were destined for bulldozing and complete reconstruction.
One man died in that storm as well. He was apparently helpings others find safety at a warehouse when a large piece of debris ended his life.
Once again, I was left shaken but unhurt. My wife was OK, too – we’d gotten the edge of the storm and received rain, wind and hail at our house, but nothing more. My car suffered only the wrath of wind-driven rain and dust. The late-night drive home was meandering because my normal route through the shadows of tall buildings was blocked off for damage assessment. Likewise, my drive into work the next day would take an extra 45 minutes.
In the Dallas/Fort Worth area, we’ve already had our first hail storm this year. Its havoc missed our house by a mile, but we have friends whose recently purchased car looks more like a golf ball from all the hail-induced dimpling. Who knows if more are on the way this year? Tornado conditions can be predicted with some accuracy, but their location is still a guess until they appear.
It makes me almost long for those easily detected hurricanes that take days to reach the shore. At least then we’d be able to pack up everything we loved and head inland. But then again, some of those hurricanes blow ashore and spawn tornadoes.
I just can’t win.
