We Survived, This Time.

So, some of you may have been hearing this week about deadly tornados in Edmond, Oklahoma and thinking...”don’t we know someone in Oklahoma? Where do they live?” Well, just a little refresher, we live in Edmond.  The major casualties of this recent storm actually occurred about 100 miles from us, but there was a lot of damage in our town.  

Tuesday morning we sent the kids off to school with a light sweater and jacket. We heard there may be a chance of severe weather sometime, but it looked lovely and warm.  In our vast experience (one year) living here we have learned that these things usually happen in the evening or night.  No worries. Later in the afternoon however, the clouds began to roll in and things started to show hints of possibly getting ugly.  Rachel was taking her afternoon nap, I was enjoying the quiet and using the computer and Dave decided to drive off during his lunch break to mail his broken iPhone to some last hope fix-it guy (iPhones do not work well after going though the spin cycle, MY only consolation is that miraculously it was Dave himself that put his pants into the washing machine with his phone still in the pocket instead of me doing it) I reminded him as he left that it would be a good idea to grab my cheapo little cell phone and take it with him.  I don’t normally call my husband an idiot, but the idiot left the phone on the counter and proceeded to drive off into the path of the tornado.  Seriously, as soon as he left I turned on the weather report to see what what going on and found our friends the weather team tracking some suspicious wind rotations just southwest of us. (I always thought being a weatherman was a cushy job until I moved here.  Man, those guys really work their tails off when storm season comes around.  Last spring I think I saw the same guy on the news for like three days straight- day and night- in the same sweaty shirt.) The trajectory looked like it would be hitting pretty close to us in about an hour (just the same time school lets out).

 Hmmm, I thought, good thing Dave only had to go to the postoffice/gas station down the street and will be back in 10 minutes. So I watched the news and waited and waited.  No Dave.  Now I was hearing thunder.  Some rain sprinkles on the roof.  No Dave.  And then the tornado sirens went off.  No Dave.  Our All-Weather warning radio changed from blinking yellow to blinking red. Great.  I had visions of Dave being huddled in the bathroom of the 7-11 and having to wait out the storm there.  The main storm was just about at the mall- 15 minutes away- around this time and I was getting ready to wake Rachel from her nap and head into our shelter, but putting if off, because who in their right mind wants to wake a sleeping kid earlier than necessary?  Finally Dave saunters in the house. Turns out that the gas station/post office combo was not good enough for him to send his broken iphone from and he had decided to drive down to the Fed Ex store near the mall!  So he basically drove into the storm and then it followed him home.  Like I said, I try not to call him names very often, but this time he deserved it. 

 We grabbed our phones and laptops, oh, and our daughter, and settled into our tornado shelter.  If you don’t have a real storm  cellar like on the Wizard of Oz or a modern storm shelter built into your garage floor  then it is recommended that you go to a lower floor room with no exterior walls or windows.  For us it’s the coat closet under the stairs.  Not a very comfortable place if you are over 2 feet tall and human.  It is also jammed with our emergency kits and of course being a coat closet, coats.  Rachel was handling everything very well.  It was still fun and a pretty neat game to play in the closet with Mom and Dad.  The thunder continued and there were occasional bouts of hail.  The news announced that there was a tornado skipping around in Oklahoma City.  After that one passed us by a few more new tornados were forming. By that time the power had gone out and our backup power was fried.  We were hot and stuffy and cramped on the closet floor.  Rachel had eaten all the snacks out of her emergency kit, stuck 100+ stickers all over the closet walls, played dolls with all our extra batteries and was really really done being forced to stay in the closet.  Dave and I felt the same way. 

 Although we were already cramped with just 3 of us in the closet, we really wished we had our other 2 with us.  We knew their school was on lock down and was probably a pretty safe place to be, but who wants to have to be with strangers in an emergency?  I worried about them having to duck with their hands over their heads in their dark classrooms for the whole time.  By about 4:30 things looked a bit settled outside (as if you could tell anything by actually looking out the window).  Amazingly, Dave had fallen asleep- I nudged him awake and told him to go down to the school and get Grant and Nina, now.  The radio said the schools were open and I was really antsy to get them home.  Nina’s teacher said that Nina did great, it was just extra time playing with her friends and having snacks for her.  Grant was pretty scared though.  He could hear all the noises from the storm from his room.  His teacher said they could not talk but made them draw pictures of tornados and that was just not doing it for him.  Even worse, a lot of the kids from his class had been picked up before him and he was worried that he would be left there.  We were very happy to be all together again.     

For the rest of the evening the tornado danger passed, but the storm continued.  We were all on edge and more than a little bit touchy.  The power was still out, my dinner plans were ruined and some people in our family get unreasonably grouchy when their meals are delayed: ME! Rachel seemed to be getting worse and worse as the evening went on.  With each clap of thunder she would scream and run into my arms.  At about 7:30 we got back our power, ate and decided we would all sleep together in Mom and Dad’s room tonight.  Everyone snuggled into their temporary beds, we turned on a movie and began to wind down, all except Rachel.  She just got more and more irritable.  By the time she was covered in sweat, screaming and holding her ear we realized hey, maybe she has an earache.  We forced some children’s pain reliever in her mouth and after that things finally began to calm down for the night.

Post-storm inspection showed that a panel of our fence had blown over and our weather vane was now leaning at a 40 degree angle, but besides that, we were good.  Some people in our ward had their roofs blown off.  Other damage such as downed power lines, trees, squashed cars and a few ripped up buildings proved that the winds had been pretty powerful out there.

So, that’s the scoop on what happened to us.  Except that this one was so early in the year, it’s not a very unique occurrence here, and I am sure we will be in our coat closet a few more times this spring and summer.  Nothing like a little brush with death and destruction to really make you appreciate life and all you have.  Maybe that outlook is actually a bonus to living here in Tornado Alley.