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Posted: 10/25/2010 9:05:29 AM EDT
Honestly I have lived in Texas my whole life and never seen one apart from media. I've seen bad storms but no tornados.
Anyone got a Tornado experience? |
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I live in GA so yeah
Take shelter early and stay down until it's over, in N. GA it's fairly mountainous, not uncommon at all for tornadoes to "skip" and just hit the high spots. We have bad "super cell" thunderstorms in the spring, if a storm is generating "rotation" I head for the basement. |
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Seen a few from a distance - most notable were multiple waterspouts out in the Gulf of Mexico - and there was barely even wind where I was. Worst one I was stuck outside near I never even saw.
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Never have seen one.
ETA: I've been through a few hurricanes though. |
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Raised in Kansas and saw multiple dozens of them over the years.
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I've seen the funnel clouds of tornadoes from a distance but I've never been close enough to see where they were touching down.
When the close ones were near I was in the basement hunkered down....... |
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Plenty. When I first got into LE I worked for a very rural SO in Oklahoma. The small communities in the county where I worked didn't have tornado warning systems in place so one of our duties was to get dispatched to a funnel cloud/tornado sighting and follow it while calling in direction and speed. Don't know why since they still couldn't notify people in it's path. This was a crappy deal during daylight but at night it was downright scary. I spent one very scary morning (3 am) following a tornado on the ground by the lightning flashes illuminating it every so often.
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I saw 2 when I lived in OK. Had a little EF-1 pass a 100 yds. from my house last year. Watched it the whole time.
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Yes. Almost bought the farm in it.
Don't think severe weather is 'cool' anymore. |
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I've seen waterspouts. They're impressive, but nothing like a full-blown tornado coming down from a supercell.
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Yes, I have been within 500 yards of a decent sized one. Pretty scary.
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Yes I have. Scary shit.
We had a guy transfer to our office from KS. His parent house got blasted when he was a kid and his house got slammed as an adult. We used to make Toto and Dorothy jokes to him till he showed us the pics of the devastation. He was scared to death of them. Very localized storms but tremendous power. |
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I have only seen one tornado way back 1993 in SD, but have seen many funnel clouds. When people see a funnel they automatically think tornado, but it is not a tornado until it touches ground.
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Just one. I grew up in the north Minneapolis suburbs. When you heard the siren, you checked to see if it was the first Wednesday of the month, and if not it was time to listen to WCCO in the basement.
We had some close calls (funnel cloud activity), lots of hail and one touchdown a couple miles from my house. Damage to the Har Mar Mall and cut through the Sound of Music (pre-Best Buy!) in Roseville, MN. The one I saw was far off to the west, which we watched from a Happy Chef parking lot. It was very eerie...pea green skies, air raid sirens going off, and a real twister silently wandering in the distance. We watched for a short while and went in search of a basement. |
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Yes a few.
One of my earliest memories is seeing my dad standing at the front door looking out as one passed within a couple hundred yards of our house. He glanced back and saw me standing there and went full retard yelling for me to get my butt back in the back room with mom where I was supposed to be. I was approx 3 years old. My impression was of a giant wall of dust and other stuff moving through the field across the road. |
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3 hurricanes (eye over my house on all) and hid in my truck under an overpass for a minor tornado. Bad hail, scared for my truck!
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Yep, several times. They can be sort of scary. However, the few times that I saw waterspouts (mostly in Charleston, SC), they didn't seem that spooky to me. They'd come up to about 5-600 yards offshore, then just disappear back up into the clouds. Kind of neat.
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In my many years as a chaser I have seen several dozen tornadoes. What is more rare though is softball and or baseball hail. I have recorded this maybe 3 times.
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I've seen 'em come ripping through "Tornado Alley" in Illinois. Pretty scary. I once saw a mobile home totally obliterated...yet the kitchen table and chairs were untouched.
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I've been in at least one hurricane. I do remember the hail storm we had in 96/97 where it totaled whole car lots. I've seen a few instances where the clouds started to slowly rotate but nothing ever happened.
Btw if the clouds slowly start rotating is that a bad sign of possible tornado? |
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Twice. An F5 in 1968 that killed a few folks and pretty much made a mess out of everything it touched. I'll never forget that green color and the sudden rush of cold air.
The second one was a smaller one while on a canoe trip. We stopped about a hundred yards from where it crossed the stream. I got hit with a few pieces of tree and lots of mud and water. That was just so much fun it was hard to describe. The resulting flash flood was also a joy. Not a drop of beer was spilled and we became instant legends with the staff at the canoe livery. |
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I've seen 2
One was on the tarmac at Dulles airport while I was standing in the terminal. |
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didn't see but heard one that came near my place a few years back
sounded like a low flying plane. lots of rumbling |
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Being from PA I only saw them on TV or movies until I started to travel.
Saw on at Kitty Hawk, NC during a hurricane in 1998 (also saw water spouts). Saw one just south of Clinton, IL in April/May 2003 (can't remember exact date). Sort of saw one outside Alexandria, LA in 2006. (it touched down but not for long). Outside Cleburne, TX in 2005. Storm hit a buddy's travel trailer off of 67 at one of the campgrounds there. I think I even have video of the storm cloud rotation and the tornado forming somewhere. Never saw hail so thick in my life; it looked like it snowed in TX in May! ETA: I forgot about Kansas City, KS/MO in 2004. Real bout of nasty storms in May/June that year. May 29th event but there was no damage. I don't even know where the heck it was just north of the airport (where I was staying). Only time I've been in a Wal Mart and they had us move to the center of the store (later in June). Locals told me it wasn't nearly as bad as 2003. |
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I got hit by a very large dust devil once in central Kansas. I was driving an open air tractor pulling an offset disk in a wheat field after harvest of 1984. It completely engulfed the tractor and implement in a twisting cloud of dust and carried my boonie hat off some 50 yards.
Does that count? |
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I live in SE Missouri...Yea i've seen a few. About 5 years ago two of my cousins were at their friends house and some tornadoes rolled thro. The father of the family was shoving them all in the closet at it ripped the house apart, the last thin the younger cousin remembers is him flying through the air backwards and being hit with something. Sadly he did not make it. The rest of the house went with it, my cousins were each thrown about 100-200 yrds from where the house was located. Neither of them had anything more than a scratch. Tornadoes do crazy stuff sometimes.
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Quoted: I've been in at least one hurricane. I do remember the hail storm we had in 96/97 where it totaled whole car lots. I've seen a few instances where the clouds started to slowly rotate but nothing ever happened. Btw if the clouds slowly start rotating is that a bad sign of possible tornado? Depends on how you look at it. If I drive from KC and get on a storm in TX and it has rotation thats a "good" sign. But to answer your question; Supercell storms when they are active have a point of interest where they rotate. The object is to find that point of rotation and keep up with it using the road network or lack thereof. Keep your eye on that rotation and take lots of pics and film. Along with some er uh scientific study of course. |
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Yes I have, most recently this past summer. We had a couple go through within a two hour period of severe weather.
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I was stationed at Ardmore Oklahoma in 1956. One night I dreamed about the time my younger brother and I had been about 2 feet under a railroad trestle when a train went over. I woke up and saw that the roof of our barracks was gone. We had been hit by a tornado and it took the roof and some ceiling joists and slammed them into the barracks about 50ft. away. I woke my roommate and told him our roof was gone he rolled over and looked up at the sky and said "No shit you're right" and went back to sleep.
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Check this out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Outbreak
I was a youngin' but I only lived about four miles from Xenia at the time, and I do remember that day quite well. Since then I have seen probably about three tornadoes, but I've never been close enough to see where it was touching down. Fujita almost gave one of the Xenia tornadoes an F6 rating. The scale only goes to F5. |
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Had rotation and large hail showing on the Doppler as it came past my house last night. No tornado, but, there was a wall of wind and rain that looked like something from an advertisement for The Weather Channel that hit us.
It was not moaning, like previous tornadoes that I have heard (never seen one though). Straight line squall that must have been blowing 60+ when it hit. White-out conditions for about 3 minutes. TRG |
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Quoted: Had rotation and large hail showing on the Doppler as it came past my house last night. No tornado, but, there was a wall of wind and rain that looked like something from an advertisement for The Weather Channel that hit us. It was not moaning, like previous tornadoes that I have heard (never seen one though). Straight line squall that must have been blowing 60+ when it hit. White-out conditions for about 3 minutes. TRG Rice TX had a real nice tornado yesterday. |
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There was one tornado that hit a pig farm that actually made it to a history channel show...I was watching that one from high ground...(relatively anyway)...as it happened...
I have seen 2 other storms in person too. Not counting cellar visits. I have a strange obsession with seeing the actual tornado(s). |
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Two, a small brief one in Muncie Indiana, and a larger one west of oklahoma city. Seen lots of rotations, and a funnel cloud or two in texas, but as yet no tornadoe.
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I've seen 3.
During a tropical storm, I saw one (a fairly big one) from a distance of about a mile. I saw a water spout in Chesapeake Bay (again, maybe a mile away) And I saw one cross the road in front of me (this was a thin "rope" type) no more than 100 yards away. I trashed a barn pretty badly after it crossed. |
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Quoted: There was one tornado that hit a pig farm that actually made it to a history channel show...I was watching that one from high ground...(relatively anyway)...as it happened... I have seen 2 other storms in person too. Not counting cellar visits. I have a strange obsession with seeing the actual tornado(s). I was there. Memorial day weekend 2008 |
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