This is not the post I had planned for today. In fact, I had quite a funny little post including e-mails containing my ransom letters to Aunt Bev about her slipper that she left at our house. Just one slipper, so I expect more of a ransom. However, after what happened today, I think that post will have to wait. I am still stunned and somewhat shaking over two hours after this has happened, and if you've turned on The Weather Channel today, then yes, I do live in that area of Pennsylvania that they won't stop talking about. But let's go back and start at the beginning. Please excuse me if this post is jumbled and less than perfect. I'm still freaking out a little.
I had a doctors appointment today. When I got up this morning, my mom was telling me about how the weather was supposed to get bad today, so she just wanted to get done what we had to do today and get home. They were calling for severe thunderstorms with hail, and there was a tornado watch. You have to understand, the tornado was not what we were worried about. We get about two tornado warnings a year, and it has become a joke, even to our weather people, when we get them. If they do begin to form here, which is very rare, they don't touch down. What happens is they form and the wind from them knocks over a few trees, and then they run away screaming back into the sky before they even gets close to the ground. We've never had a tornado here in the twenty five years I've lived here that has touched the ground. We just don't get them here. According to the Weather Channel, which I am still listening to as I type, we've had very few here and they've done no damage except for knock over a few trees before retreating, as we have a ton of hills and valleys and they break up after less than a minute on the ground. So we set out trying to beat the storm and worried that if we got the hail they were calling for, which we do get hail kind of often here, it was going to severely damage the only running vehicle we have.
Despite what they were calling for, the weather defied them. Instead of being fifty one degrees and disgusting out, it was sixty nine degrees and sunny. Still, weather can change here in a second, so we were doing the best we could to hurry up, just in case that storm and hail did come through. As we stopped to take spring pictures of the outside of one of the houses my mom had for sale post the appointment, it began to rain and got very dark. We finished up and started home, but it became sunny against nearly instantly. We were going to just head home so that we were with our animals when and if the storm hit, but since it cleared up and we were going past there, we decided to stop at Target and pick up my prescription today, seeing as we had time with the nice weather. Plus, we didn't want to have to go back down there unnecessarily tomorrow.
We parked our car, went into Target, and started shopping. We were in there less than five minutes when it suddenly sounded like the roof was caving in. The whole store froze. No one knew what to do, as we hadn't heard anything like it before. It took a good minutes until someone announced that it was just hailing outside, although they were softball sized balls of hail, and it was fine. Everyone went about their business, but the weather had turned from sunny to hailing in less than five minutes. The hail only lasted another five minutes before it stopped, leaving everyone to run outside and make sure their cars were okay. It turns out, instead of hail, we were actually getting softballs sized snowballs that had broken up upon hitting the ground, doing no harm. It had done this in the still sixty nine degree weather, though, and we had just gotten snow without a temperature drop. You could almost see the panic on everyone's faces, because that has never happened before, but there were no freight train noises, nothing to indicate it had done anything but hail, so everyone moved on with their shopping.
As we were checking out, one of my mom's co-workers ended up coming into Target and seeing us. She was worked up and started telling us about how she was showing a house about a mile away when the hail hit, and she had to rush to get everyone inside of the house so no one was hurt, however, the power went off and they were standing there in the dark. After the hail let up, she had decided to stop in Target on her way past and get batteries for her flashlights in her car in case it happened again. She also wanted to tell us that we couldn't get up the local road, because, for some reason, it was blocked going the opposite way that she had gone when leaving the house. She figured in the hail and apparent wind that some trees had been knocked over, and since she knew we took that way home, we appreciated her letting us know.
As we left Target, it began to rain heavily and thunder, so we knew the storm was coming. We began driving home and got less than a mile down the road when it started to hail again. This time it was actual hail, and since we were not on a road where we could pull over, we were stuck driving in the heavy rain and hail, but were moving really slowly and praying really hard that the hail didn't come through our windshields.
This is the point in the story where you have to understand that weather panics me. Give me a few dead people, give me a snake, anything, and I'm fine. But bad weather, like horrible storms and the like, will give me little panic attacks. I don't know why, but it's always scared me. I can get through snow and regular storms, but when it gets really bad, it just flips me the hell out. Therefore, I pulled out my phone and went into the weather application for Blackberry, which allows me to get up to the minute updates. I began to read it off to my mom so that we could try and figure out why the sudden change in weather. The application told me that there had been a tornado that had briefly touched down about thirty miles from where we were, but had broken up about fifteen miles from where we were, and was no more. What we were dealing with was a storm front that was coming from the opposite direction and hitting the lingering front from the former tornado, making it rain and hail at the same time, but to be careful of the lightening, as it was touching ground. We weren't too worried, as the tornado was off the ground, nowhere near us, and it was just a storm. Things were fine. We'd get home just fine.
Just as we felt that way, we saw traffic piling up on the road we were on. As we got closer, we saw emergency vehicles. We pulled up more and saw a few trees down from the weather. Stupid weather and totally normal for this heavily wooded area. Every time we get bad weather, or even moderate winds, trees start to fall, because there's a lot of really old, dead ones in the area. This was normal and we were more worried about our animals being afraid in the storm, as they were home themselves, and that we couldn't get home to them and would have to turn around and find another way. Having no other choice, we joined the traffic line and waited our turn to be able to turn around at the emergency vehicles, one at a time, as they commanded us to do. They were directing traffic off of another road, too, that met the road we were on and weren't able to get down it because of the fallen tree. We moved up slowly, and as we came to the one point around the corner of the road, I happened to look out my window and saw that a line of trees were knocked over to the immediate right of us. The trees were very close together, so it was logical to think that the lightening had hit one, snapped it, and it caused a domino effect. And then I looked up and out the front window.
About forty yards away, there was a tree down across the road, and I knew something wasn't right. I began to look to the left and immediately wished I wouldn't have done it. I then looked back to the right, only I looked past the trees right outside my window. A tornado had come straight through there and we were sitting in the middle of the path of where it had been. There was an old barn down on the left, and the line of trees that had once been up on the hill were plowed straight through. To the right, there was a house with shingles torn off of it pretty badly, but the trees on both sides of the house and behind it were completely gone in one big straight line. It was clearly this man's house had been in the eye of the storm and he got very, very lucky, as everything ten feet away from his house and more was gone. He was an older man of at least seventy, standing outside of his house and just looking at everything, in complete shock and humbled. Cue me losing my shit.
This began an hour of us trying to get home. We tried to get home several ways, but the tornado had followed a path, wiping out the trees and the roads, but oddly, it seemed to have missed all the houses we were seeing. At one point, there were trees down less than twenty feet behind two houses, but both of the houses were absolutely fine, except for a few shingles. You could trace the path where the tornado had gone right around them, crossed in front of them, and took out all the trees on the other side of the road. It felt like I was literally standing in the middle of Twister, full of disbelief and expecting a movie director to yell cut at any moment. This just does not happen here.
As we kept trying to get home, the news came in on my phone that a tornado had touched down on the opposite side of where we live from where we were, meaning we were surrounded by tornadoes each touching down less than two miles from our house. We began to panic, worried if our house would be there, worried if our animals were okay, and all we wanted to do was get home. I, of course, inserted crying here. The devastation and fear overtook me, but at least it had stopped raining and hailing, making it easier to see just what had happened.
As we finally found a way to go and started to get closer to home, we passed the high school that I had once gone to, before being homeschooled. This was my local high school. This wasn't far from my house. And yet it was heavily damaged. The roof was gone, there were bricks everywhere, there were emergency crews surrounding it by the dozens, news crews there, and there were kids inside. We had to keep driving, hoping we could get down one last road to our house. We trooped on, afraid of what we might see, but the closer we got to our house, everything seemed completely untouched. We had power, when no one else did. It had rained, there was one old tree down that was bound to fall over eventually, but everything was fine. Our animals were fine, our house was fine, nothing had happened. There's no words for how relieved we were, but also none to describe what we had seen, what I would have been okay with never seeing in my life and if I see it again it will be too soon, but we hadn't even heard the half of what had happened.
We immediately got in the door, hugged the crap out of our animals, and settled in to watch the news. It didn't take long to find out that the time the tornado hit was the time when we first heard the large snowballs while in Target. Had we not gone in Target, we would have been in the path of the tornado as it hit, trying to drive with nowhere to go. Stopping in Target may have quite literally saved our lives. We then came to find out that twenty seven houses were leveled, several had roof damage or were missing the roofs, trailer trucks that were sitting at a landscaping company were thrown hundreds of yards away, but everyone, including all the kids in the high school, was alive. Everyone.
We're awaiting news on the rating of the tornado. They have the people who gauge that out here now figuring out what exactly hit us. Apparently, the tornado that hit here was not the same tornado that hit thirty miles away. It did break up. One formed over our high school, slammed into the high school, split in not two, like we originally thought, but THREE, and just went for it. The roof is off and the school is flooding, but all the kids, every single one, are fine. The ones trapped under the houses when they collapsed? As of a minute ago, we just got word that they are all fine, too. No one even had to be hospitalized. It's the most surreal thing, because we are completely untouched, but if we go a mile and a half to two miles in either direction, there is just obliteration. Here are a few videos to show you what happened.
Not my video, but of someone riding in a car as the tornado formed.
Pulling up after knocking over houses post the split at the high school.
The funnel cloud forming again.
The hail.
More hail.
I am still terrified and will be for awhile. Every time I go somewhere, I'm going to see the path where the tornado tore straight through, I'm going to see things flattened, and I'm going to remember this day. The images are just coming in from the tornado and the damage is far worse than we even saw while we were driving. So many people are displaced right now, mobile homes have been overturned, but everyone is safe. Maybe it's not a big deal for people who live in tornado ally, or in places that are more inclined to get tornadoes, but we just do not get them here. We just don't. We don't even have tornado warning signals. So to go from never have tornadoes to making the "Storm on the Day" on the Weather Channel is terrifying, and I if it ever happens again it will be far, far too soon.
But everyone is okay. Everyone is safe and accounted for. Things cleared up after our last bit of hail and the weather has been a slow rain, which apparently is going to be followed by snow tonight. And thank God, quite literally, that we are still having a much better day than Japan. It just breaks my heart and I pray for the recovery of the country and for as many people as possible. In retrospect, what happened today was nothing, but terrifying none the less.
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