I had very mixed emotions about President Obama on the ground in Alabama after the rage and fury of Mother Nature. What part was compassion and what part was a campaign photo-op. I'm sure he remembered the flack about George Bush doing the fly-over after Katrina and didn't want to fall into that trap, but the fact is, whenever a president is on the ground during a natural disaster, precious resources needed for search and rescue are pulled from their job to provide security for the "visit". That's why Bush did the fly-over. And that's the only way to get the full picture of the devastation.
I know tornado's quite well having lived 2 years in Lawton, Oklahoma which is in the heart of Tornado Alley, although it appears the storms are forming farther east so Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas aren't affected as much as they once were. During the spring and summer of '73, we averaged a tornado watch every day, and a tornado warning a week. There was no Doppler radar at that time. The best we could hope for was that normal citizens would report funnel clouds, or the National Weather Service at Will Rogers in Oklahoma City would see a "suspicious" cloud formation on their normal weather radar. We also had what are now called "stormchasers".
Besides my normal 8-5 at Fort Sill, I was also the night jock at the local FM station and an auxiliary Cameron County deputy sheriff. In Oklahoma, the county sheriff's were law enforcement and was in charge of what used to be called Civil Defense. I became a deputy when our program director came in one night in uniform and when I asked, he told me about the program. First and foremost, they preferred military and ex military because there wasn't a need for extensive background checks and we were already weapons qualified. So I applied and was accepted. It gave us the edge on news gathering and also provided a service to the community which looked good when we re-applied for our station's license.
It was a paid position, and we had to go on patrol once a week, I usually took the Friday midnight to 8am Saturday shift with my PD, and, when severe weather hit. Tornadoes usually travel southwest to northeast, so we would send cars out to the southwest part of the county and inward toward town and sit and wait. We'd watch the sky through lightning looking for funnel clouds and listen for the roar. It's very scary sitting in a squad car in rain so heavy you can't see the end of the car, with winds over 50 miles an hour. One night we had 160 funnel clouds (clouds with rotation) go over the city. Luckily, none of them came to ground. But one did in a neighboring county. I forget the name of the town but it roared up main street where there was a an assisted living home that was flattened. At first they thought there would be massive casualties, but luckily there were none. Relatives had taken the residents out without telling anybody.
Another night there was a supercell that went just north of town and according to the National Weather Service, it topped out at 55,000 feet. The sheet lightning within the cloud lasted as much as 30 seconds and was bright enough to read by. It also did strange things to radio waves. I listened to an FM station in Detroit that came in clearer than our own.
On the western side of town there was a mountain that stood alone on the plain called Mt. Scott. It was a National Wildlife Preserve where buffalo had the right of way. If a buffalo was crossing the road, you had to stop. There was also an old Native American saying that Lawton would be spared of tornadoes. But while I was in Italy, a news story crossed the wire that a tornado had hit Lawton and 5 people died.
Tornadoes are unpredictable as well. A friend of mine was General Manager of the television station outside of town and one day they were preparing for the 6pm news and one of the cameramen saw a funnel cloud so he opened the back door of the studio and wheeled the camera over and began shooting. As everybody gathered to watch, they realized it was heading for the building. Everybody went for cover, when the twister sucked the water out of a small pond nearby and jumped the building and continued for another mile where it destroyed some mobile homes.
Now, when there's a tornado warning, I don't fear, I respect. The best thing you can do is plan where you will go should there be a warning in your area. Basements are best, a first floor bathroom if it's not against an interior wall, even a church or other substantial building. The odds are very slim that you'll ever see one on the ground. The last round was an anomaly, and has nothing to do with global warming, it just has to do with mother nature's normal weather cycle. Just like the number of Hurricanes have an ebb and flow year over year, so to do super-cells. Just be alert and be safe.
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