Our first tornado
May 12, 2010 | 5 Comments | In the News

Even though we have been here since August of last year, May 10th was our first tornado experience in Oklahoma City.
And they don’t call it Tornado Alley for nothin’. Dorothy wasn’t kidding around.
Brandon has experienced his fair share of tornadoes in Nebraska, but I am fortunate enough to only have a faint second-hand recollection of the twister that swept through Edmonton in 1987. We get some pretty amazing storms and weather up in Saskatchewan, but nothing of the destructive funnel cloud type. Pretty lucky for the prairies, I know.
Yesterday, a few storms started brewing in the northern part of the state over the course of the afternoon. Weather tends to move from the southwest to the northeast around here, so we weren’t in the path of those twisters and baseball-sized hail.
Around 4pm, I turned on the TV. I still have no idea why I did that. I never watch TV during the day… A local station had interrupted their regularly scheduled program for continuous advertisement-free coverage of the storms. I couldn’t help but be sucked in as tornado tips and warnings scrolled along the bottom of the screen, listing counties that were predicted to be in imminent danger.
Pretty quickly, two innocent looking storms to the southwest of the city made their presence known. The 3D radar and fancy weather technology on the screen flashed shades of red and animated swirly clouds. You could tell the news anchors were getting a little anxious. People around here still talk about the May 1999 storm as if it just happened yesterday. This one had 100mph winds and was sweeping across the map at 55mph. It had the potential to quickly develop into something big.
And it was headed straight for metro Oklahoma City.
Brandon called soon after to ask me to pick him up from work. Even if there was no threat of a twister rolling through our neighbourhood, he wanted to protect his car in the hospital parkade from the aforementioned baseball-sized hail. By the time I picked him up, the urgency on the radio had quickened and city-wide sirens were blaring.
We have no basement at our house (I’m surprised at how rare those are here!) and no storm shelter. So we went home, picked up the dogs, and drove the 5-7 minutes back to the hospital underground parking garage. We sat in the 4Runner and listened to the storm trackers on the radio.
The storm crossed highway I-35 and you could tell the announcer was frustrated that so many cars had decided to try and drive through the storm. What a disaster if a twister touched down! The stopped and blocked traffic ended up worse off than sitting ducks.
Instead of heading into OKC, the storm veered more directly to the east and swept through Moore and Norman. The National Weather Service thinks 21 tornadoes touched down throughout the state that day. The damage in the FOX photo above is from an outlying area of Norman. There are reports that two people died (including a mother of three) and 104 were injured.
We headed out of the parkade about 45 minutes later and were met with bright shining sunlight. The one good thing about a fast-moving storm with no other weather systems on its heels is that it passed quickly. We were all safe.
My heart goes out to those families that lost loved ones and their homes. I hope they find comfort and security and the strength to rebuild in the coming weeks and months.




















