Hazy afternoons — like we had today — remind me of earlier parts of my life when I would often sit out in my driveway and watch the sky slowly cloud up in advance of a fierce thunderstorm.
We don't really get thunderstorms where I live now. Or, at least, they are a considerable rarity that occurr maybe once or twice a year and then only amount to a bit of rolling thunder echoing through the nearby mountains.
We often had violent weather where I lived in central Texas, and it was not unusual for us to have strong afternoon thunderstorms almost every day during the summer and early fall. It was also not unusual for the tornado warnings to start rolling in, and occasionally the warnings came close enough that the only safe and prudent thing to do was to seek shelter in the inside closet that was built in under the concrete stairs that went straight down to the foundation, and were dug directly into the hillside.
We'd sit in the small space and huddle up for 30-45 minutes and come back out and generally be grateful that we've managed to stay out of the primary path of the worst of it, even though there would be branches and debris down in the yard. Much of the time, what we really had was just massive rains and very strong straight-line winds.
The house had a metal roof, and so when it was hailing it would get really really loud... although one of the benefits of a metal roof was that it would hold up pretty well to a hailstorm.
We escaped the tornadoes the entire time I lived there, but our surroundings often did not. The Albertsons grocery store — I regularly went to shop — was about 3 miles from the house and it had its roof blown off by a tornado one time. I remember driving home from the post office one afternoon and being able to see two separate twisters out on the horizon. They weren't particularly large and they were basically moving through unpopulated scrubland but... still.
It was an afternoon when more than a dozen tornadoes touched down in our general area.
I lived not too far from the small town of Jarrell, Texas, which was hit by an exceptionally powerful F5 tornado on that same late May afternoon in 1997; the same day the tornado took the roof off our Albertson's grocery store.
I was part of a volunteer clean up crew that went out to the site afterwards to help out and it was a sobering reminder of how extremely powerful nature is, and how insignificant we humans are.
You may have seen tornado damage on TV news reports, but this was different. When we drove into this one neighborhood where there was literally nothing there except for the concrete slabs of the foundations where the houses had been.
N.O.T.H.I.N.G.
The winds had scoured the top three inches of asphalt off the surface of the roads so it was kind of rough but what made it so eerie was that there was no debris to sift through — everything was simply gone, erased. There were no broken trees, no cars, no partial houses, no lawns…
The winds from that storm were estimated to have been about 260 MPH (about 420 km/h or 116 m/s). Not surprising that meteorologists sometimes refer to these extreme tornadoes as ”The Finger of God.”
To this day, the experience haunts me and remains one of the strongest memories I have. And it's definitely not something I ever want to see again...
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!
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Created at 2025.05.10 00:38 PDT
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