Tornado

Quite the series of thunderstorms this evening. A lot of lightning, thunder, rain and wind. And tornadoes. Yes, tornadoes. In Maine.

I used to live in Nebraska so I know all about tornadoes. The watches and the warnings. The silence before the ferocity of the storm when all one can hear is the wailing of the tornado sirens. Then the powerful storm would hit and people would hide in basements hoping their house would still be above them when it was all over.

I have lived in Maine for 14 years. I have never heard of there being a tornado warning on the news. Every time a storm has been bad enough that it seemed like there was a tornado, the National Weather Service would have to go out to assess it to see if it was a tornado or just straight line winds. Usually it ended up being straight line winds.

Tonight there were tornado warnings. The weather people were all over the local networks showing graphics and the radar and speculating where it might be heading next. I usually watch Channel 6 and their radar and graphics seemed colorful but fairly accurate giving the viewers the information they need without the causing hysterics. At one point I switched over to Channel 13 and their graphics were quite…how shall I put it….HUGE. They had drawings of tornadoes that looked like they could cover the southern half of Maine. If you laid the drawing down so that the bottom point was on the coast, the top of the drawing would stretch into Vermont. That is one big huge tornado. Enough to cause terror and alarm in anyone who was watching the weather on that station. After watching a minute or two of that spectacle, I switched back over to Channel 6 so I could see a more reasonable representation of the weather.

It is all very odd. Not the weird graphics on Channel 13, although they were odd, but I mean having actual tornado warnings in Maine. Very strange weather to be having. Could it be, dare I say it….Global Warming???? Extreme weather. That is the sign. I wonder if anyone is paying attention. Probably not. It will be put in the category of an unusual summer with the hope that next year might be more “normal”. I hope it will be. I doubt it. But I hope so.

In the mean time, I’m going to do what I did in Nebraska whenever there was a tornado in the area. Go outside to see if I can see it then run like the dickens back inside if I saw anything odd forming in the sky. I don’t have a basement to hide out in but I have an inside bathroom. It will be safer than the time I was standing in the dining room of my parent’s house when the funnel cloud passed over. Walls moved in and out and it sounded like a freight train running over the house. It was ok in the end because the only damage was the tops of the trees were taken off. That, and there were cracks at the top of each wall in the house where the walls separated from the ceiling briefly. Made for a great conversation starter when company was over.

I hope everyone was safe tonight during the storms and I hope that damage has been minimal. I also highly recommend obeying the weather people when they say to take shelter in the event of a harsh storm. It is the wisest course of action.