Tornadoes

Since everyone keeps asking....

A tornado touched down 3 miles from my house last night, but nothing other than rain and lightning happened here. We never lost power, no trees down that I saw, not even too many branches in our yard. Yet 3 miles to the south, a building collapsed and windows on giant skyscrapers blew out. Crazy. A friend of mine on the other side of downtown said she heard the roar of the tornado, but it missed her street too. I did come a lot closer to her than me.

I was actually on the phone with Wes (still in China) when it happened. It started raining and lightning, and I looked at the weather channel while on the phone and noticed a tornado warning for the city, which is rare. I then went into Margaret's room because she was afraid of the thunder, and she and I talked to Wes. I heard wind, but nothing alarming. Now I wonder if I would have been alarmed if I wasn't distracted by the phone. After I hung up the phone, I turned on the tv to see the Georgia Dome being evacuated. Weird.

I didn't go to bed until really late, because I wanted to make sure the next round of storms would miss us, and if it was close I would take Margaret to Henry's room. But that one didn't come nearby luckily.

I think there may have been another tornado sighting today (no touch down) when we were at the TMBG concert. When they came out for an encore, they said that they would play a few extra songs, and "the parents can watch the evening news later to find out why." I later found out that another storm hit right at that time. It was all over when we did leave 20 minutes later. When we were leaving the parking lot, we saw a man who was just standing and looking at the sky. I wondered if he had seen the tornado.

So ends my blase attitude toward tornadoes. I used to believe that the Atlanta heat island pushed severe weather out toward the suburbs, because it's such a trend to see storms head toward us and then veer sharply north just outside the perimeter. I guess we were really lucky this weekend that no one in the city was killed. A couple of people in the rural areas were killed and many injured, but it's amazing that so many people were downtown for multiple events on Friday night, and it could have been so much worse.