Quote:
Originally Posted by madlex
Almost ashamed to say but we have a finished basement that has the kids playroom and my home gym. No question we would have gone downstairs if it was 6PM but at midnight I didn't want to wake up the rest of the family.
Based on the weather map on TV we weren't in the direct path and there was no reported touchdown anyway. In fact not even our trampoline blew over which is something that usually happens if wind gets very strong. Next morning I found out it went past us like a mile to the East with 100 mile wind speeds so I guess it could have been dangerous had it touched down? Daycare provider just hardcore when she asked how our daughter handled the storm and I told her she slept through it. I guess next time I'll wake up the family.
My attitude used to be far worse than that. If I'm asleep I'm going to sleep through most things, and I get very grumpy if I'm awakened. When my wife used to wake me up about the weather, I'd say "let me know if you hear a freight train" and just turn over. The morning ours hit, I was supposed to meet a gambling buddy a few hours away for a trip, but it was storming so I was in no hurry to get up to make the drive. She was getting the kids ready for school and woke me up to tell me about the weather around 6:30. I'm sure I said something flippant.
A few minutes after 7 I either woke up or was already half-awake and noticed that the noise didn't sound right, so I started getting out of bed. It was only a few seconds later that I could see leaves and stuff blowing horizontally outside so I decided pants would be sufficient and I'd better go get the others. I was still pulling my pants up when they nearly ran over me coming into the bedroom. I pushed them onto the floor between the bed and a dresser, laid across them the best I could, and stuff got crazy immediately. The window where I had seen leaves blowing was now revealing trees coming down. All I could think of was how much it was going to hurt my back when the roof and attic gave way. I was pretty happy when that didn't happen.
The three deaths that storm caused was the impetus for our county to install sirens county-wide because there was a furor that those folks got no warning when sirens had been available for a while. These days I'm almost always checking the TV for weather coverage if the weather starts getting dicey. Sirens are nice, but now I want all the information I can get. If I'm in the path, I'm going to hide whether the tornado is on the ground at the time or not. Those things can bounce up and down like a rubber ball or they can just stay on the ground for miles.
They tell you to have a safe spot picked out. Our house really doesn't have a good safe spot, but it has two areas that seem less bad than all the others so we settled on what seems to be the better of them.