One Year Today

[poltergeisty]

Hard to believe this massive sucker was about 6 miles from me.

Video - Breaking News Videos from CNN.com

Spotted and/or touched down where I live: I live: ACME Mapper 2.0

My recollections posted on another forum:

Here's a testament to weather radios. I have one on all the time, especially here during the summer. The weather radio was going off all day. At around 11:30 the alert went off and I heard of thunderstorm warnings. Then about 15 minutes latter the alert went off again for tornado warnings. Then once again the alert went off on a tornado spotted near Widsor. Once I heard that my stomach sank. Turned on the scanners and heard all kinds of traffic. Then I heard a fire fighter say Windsor got hit bad. I would not have known otherwise if my weather radio wasn't on. It was about an hour latter that I got a reverse 911 call and my town (Loveland) had activated its EOC (Emergency Operations Center) Many agency's are involved; Cheyenne, wyo sent several type I fire trucks and a 10 person heavy rescue crew, four K-9 search teams, Boulder County sent a task force of three type I trucks, Jefferson County sent a type III Incident management team, State Patrol had 38 people and the National Guard sent 36, among the other response teams were dump trucks and tractors. My town's police department is there as I can hear them on their tac channel.

All in all, it was a roller coaster of a ride so to speak listing to coms all day and trying to find the damn cats to put down stares. The weather yesterday was very odd and in fact so was the tornadoes. The damn tornado its self looked like a moving thunder storm.

We are still getting tornado warnings and/or watches, but looking on the radar I don't see much in the way of storm cells heading this way, mostly out east has tornado warnings. I have a close ear on skywarn on the ham radio frequency, so I hear first hand reports from the national weather service with updates to the Red Cross, etc. The season is just beginning...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfYuT0oalXQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZexAEwV-o8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbozJoq8xg4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_UEHOM0How


If I remember, last year it was unseasonably hot in May. Now I have to dig up the stats.

 

[mancow]

We missed it by minutes only because we stopped to get a hamburger. Otherwise we probably would have driven right into it. I remember scanning the State system and hearing someone talking about inches of hail and casualties.

 

[Halfpint]

We live only 3 miles from where it started. At that particular time we had 2 children in school, one in platteville and the other in Gilcrest. The scanners were all pretty much going nuts and our weather radios were squawking so much that we'd actually turned off all but the one back in our bedroom so while we could somewhat hear what they were saying and also hear the scanners. The start was so fast that neither school really actually managed to go into full tornado mode! What made it even scarier for *us* was the fact that it actually gone *between* Platteville and Gilcrest pretty much before everything broke loose!

I guess what added to the scare was that both Cheryl and I experienced a tornado `up close and personal' back in the late '80s when one actually came through our place one afternoon. We had scanners and weather alert radios back then and neither of them made a peep about there being and signs of tornadic activity in our area. Suddenly, without any prior warning the wind picked up and started to sound like the proverbial freight train or tail end of a jet engine the trailer house we were living in at the started to shake and then just as fast everything went dead quiet and calm. (We were both actually at our front door looking out through the screen door when it hit!) After we'd somewhat recovered we ventured out into our yard and only then noticed that an old chicken coop and a couple old hog sheds that had been on the West end of our garage/shed were now missing. On further examination we also discovered that everything had been swept clean off of the roof of the `main' house. When we went around the front of the `main' house, to check up on Cheryl's grandparents, we discovered that some of the remains of the sheds and coop were scattered about the parking area in front of it *and* the whole roof of one of the hog sheds was laying right where her grandparent's car would have been parked if I hadn't moved it into the garage/shed about and hour earlier. Interestingly enough neither of her grandparents hadn't heard it noticed anything awry happening it had passed through so quickly. Heck! If we hadn't been actually standing at our front door `looky-looing' at everything we also might not of discovered the debris and destruction until probably sometime later. Once one has gone through even that one's `respect' for tornados increases *many times* fold!

One of our neighbors, just down the road, was out in one of his fields in his tractor and had the misfortune to end up sitting through the same tornado touch down and watched it turn his brand new centre pivot irrigation system into a mangled array of aluminum `sphagetti' and then bounce back up and move on further down the road.

Now the thing that *really* made last year's twister worse/amazing to us here was that in this area tornados *do not* usually travel on a NorthWesterly `track' rather they usually go NorthEasterly. Cheryl and kept listening to hear if it had finally decided to start going NorthEasterly the whole we listened and basically kept praying for those in it's path no matter *which* direction it wanted to go.