Tornado warnings.

[hbarcat]

Friday night in Illinois was interesting. They were predicting severe thunderstorms with tornado watches. I was monitoring the radar as a line of powerful storms moved into the area with hail and damaging winds.

Just as the storm front arrived, the neighborhood tornado sirens started going of so I grabbed my adult daughter and her two girls (9 and 3) and we headed into the basement where we keep emergency supplies and maintain a safe storm shelter.

As soon as we got hunkered down, the wind picked up speed and it was quite noisy. The windows were rattling and the entire house was vibrating.

Suddenly, we heard an extremely loud cracking sound that was clearly a big tree coming down. A second later, the whole house shook and we could feel the impact in the ground right through the concrete floor.

Then the power went out. Fortunately, we had several emergency lanterns and we had them lit up so the girls didn't get too scared. I was doing my best to keep the girls, especially the 3 year old, from panicking, by staying calm and reassuring.

It was about 5 minutes before the wind stared dying down. I watched the radar on my weather app and saw that the storm had actually passed rather quickly and there was calm skies expected for the remains of the night.

The power came back on and we went upstairs.

This is what we saw in the morning.

My house is the red one. The top of the tree is less than 10 feet from the house.

We're lucky one of the 2 giant oaks in my front yard didn't come down. There's also an absolutely gigantic cottonwood in our backyard (you can see it towering over my house in the picture) and it's so heavy that it would crush our house like nothing if it fell.


I took the girls to the park a block from our house and there were at least 6 big trees downed there.

 

[smeet]

Dang man, glad your family and house are ok! Did a tornado actually touch down in your yard?

 

[MYLOWFREQ]

I'm glad you are safe and kudos to you for having emergency plans I think you did great!

Can they inspect and maybe cut down the tree(s) that pose danger?

 

[hbarcat]

No touchdowns in my city (there were several touchdowns in other areas), but the wind briefly gusted over 100 mph in my neighborhood.

 

[hbarcat]

I'm glad you are safe and kudos to you for having emergency plans I think you did great!

Can they inspect and maybe cut down the tree(s) that pose danger?

The city has crews all over, taking care of downed trees. They'll eventually get to our block, but my neighborhood is heavily blue collar/immigrant, so we're their lowest priority.

The tree is actually sitting on top of the phone line, although I don't believe anyone is using it because most people don't use land lines anymore.

 

[Roxbororob]

Glad to hear you are all safe and sound.

 

[bholder]

Wow.

 

[IamGroot]

In 98 or 99, I was orking in Rome and my family was living on our ranch north of Houston. They didnt answer my phone calls for two days.

Turns out they had a tornado. Destroyed the house and garage roofs, ripped up two magnolias right by the house. Lots of live oak lims sown just like your photo. Lost three old live oak and one red oak.

Wife and kids stayed in hallway of house till it passed.

Days of chainsaw work and burning.

 

[Killing Floor]

So glad you are ok. Here in Austin we don’t have many but growing up in Atlanta and later living in Nashville we had more tornado traffic. Once at work we had a door open and everyone’s papers got sucked out the door and the building next door was leveled.
I’ve been through some close calls, it’s scary. Stay safe.

 

[hbarcat]

The Wendy's sign took a beating.

 

[fhm555]

No touchdowns in my city (there were several touchdowns in other areas), but the wind briefly gusted over 100 mph in my neighborhood.

Yep, straight line winds can really cause trouble. It's been a banner year here for wet, windy weather. Fast moving cold fronts from our northwest run into warm gulf air over around Texas or Louisiana, throwing off some serious squall lines moving northeast, usually covering multiple states that often spawn tornados or unusually strong straight line wind gusts out ahead of those lines. It's hard to go far around here without seeing evidence of straight line winds, things like a barn with a torn up roof not thirty feet from a house not touched at all, stuff like that. Hope all is well.

 

[hbarcat]

I feel the need to put this thread in perspective. While some people in my town have been inconvenienced by the Friday night storm, the entire storm system spawned dozens of highly destructive tornadoes in several states that resulted in at least 24 deaths.

 

[hbarcat]

I've learned that the windstorm that downed trees in my neighborhood on Friday evening strengthened as it went forward, and touched down as a full EF1 tornado traveling 27 miles along the ground, eventually tearing the roof off of the Apollo theater in Belvedere, Illinois during a sold out concert, killing one and injuring 40.

 

[hrodbert696]

Glad you and your family are OK!

We used to live in Indiana, and got those from time to time. We were up by the Michigan line, so the very northern end of Tornado Alley, but still in it. One time there was a big storm and we ourselves couldn't make out much of it other than general wind and thunder, but it turned out two big ones had torn through town between our neighborhood and the regional airport a little ways to the west.

 

[Wild_Bill_57]

Strong straight line winds stripped the siding off the west side of my house and uprooted 2 trees out back. Insurance adjuster should be here this morning. They are saying this is going to be a pretty active storm season this spring.

 

[Deleted member 365158]

About 14 or so year’s ago I was living in Vancouver wa. We had a small one touch down a block away from our house. My kids were at kinder care and my wife and I were home. I remember sitting and looking out our big picture window and saying “baby, look, the sky is turning green”. My wife is from Ohio, she said “thats a tornado coming”. Me “we don’t get tornadoes here in the NW”. Just then all the trees started whipping around like crazy. We bailed to the smallest room downstairs and waited. It was like a freight train was running over the house. When it was over, we had a tree go down and took out our fence. A block away roofs were missing off houses and trees were snapped in half, you could see the trail of destruction it left.
My kids were fine at kindercare.
About a 1/2 mile east, it touched down again and hit guess what….. a trailer park

 

[feterpatch]

Wow! Glad you're safe. Not that it matters now, but was the tree that came down in your front yard rotten in the center?

 

[SoonerBill]

Glad you're all ok.
When I was in 5th grade we stood at our front door and watched the debris from a Taco Bell, a local burger joint and a Ford dealer that were a couple blocks away get sucked up into a tornado. It wasn't until a piece of the burger joint's sign landed in our yard that we decided to head to the center of the house and huddle. The next morning school was closed because all the streets around it were blocked by downed trees.

 

[gln1955]

That was a scary system Saturday night. It plowed through OH as I was loading out from a gig. I just got soaking wet, but two fairly whimpy tornados touched down in the area causing some damage but no injuries.

I've spent the majority of my life in Oklahoma, West Texas and now Ohio, and have had several tornados come too close for comfort over the years.

 

[kesslari]

Really glad you are OK. This has been a brutal winter/early spring all over, weatherwise. Big winds, coupled with saturated ground, caused a lot of trees to fall up here in our mountains. A friend and fellow musician's home was hit. I can think of half a dozen houses that were crushed, those are just the ones I've driven by or know about.
We had a redwood next out our house crack and start leaning over the house - next big wind would have taken it down, but we were able to get a tree service to take it down before it came down on its own (and on the house).
I'm glad you dodged the bullet.