Holiday 2019 part 2

Heavy Weather

After the graduation, the weather continued to be less than optimal for outdoors activities, so we hunkered down and watched the rain.

We did have some sunny days, but the temperatures were lower than normal, which was useful for us Brits, because we were able to walk over to the local stores on dry days, but the weather did not stay dry for long

Whenever it rains in Kansas, you usually get thunder and lightning and this year was no exception.  We went to bed to the sound of thunder going around us and woke in the morning to the same sounds.  The rain continued to fall on and off and now and again flood warnings were given out for various parts of the area.

 When over in the States, although my phone will connect via AT & T, it costs a lot per day if I use it, so I use a locally bought phone when over there.  This year we were planning a trip to a much larger city than Lawrence whilst we were in the USA, so TBH and I decided that we would be well advised to use two local low cost phones, one for each of us in case we got separated.  So I upgraded to a newer model giving TBH my old AT & T phone and bought a new SIM for it that gave 90 days of local phone calls.  Something we have found essential in the past, because if, or more likely when, our flight times are changed by the airline, we would need to contact them from inside the airport to organise a new connection.  This could take several long phone calls and if the phone ran out of minutes just before that date, we would have difficulty doing this.

My Trcfone LG on the left and the older AT & T on the right

Having two phones also  meant that we could keep in touch when out and about without having to rely on one of the family.  My new phone was nothing fancy, but it was a more recent model than the one we had bought about four years before when over there.

During one particularly heavy storm, around six PM, I was out on the porch watching the lightning and hoping to get a photo of a lightning flash when my phone started to make a rather nerve jangling sound.  I took it out to look at it and it had a large message on the screen telling me a tornado was heading my way and I should seek my safe place immediately!
No sooner than I had digested this, when TBH burst out of the front door telling me we had to get down into the basement right now!
The house's alarm had gone off and the TV was giving out a warning for Douglas County.

This is the kind of thing that residents of Tornado Alley tend to own and there is one similar to this in TS and TDIL's bedroom, which gives out alarms and pre-recorded messages.

This bombardment of alarms and warnings is standard practice for the area, sending out warnings to your cell phone, TV and radio, but this was a first for us and the first time in The Grandson's (TG's) too. For The Daughter In Law (TDIL) this was the second time a tornado been predicted to be approaching their house in eighteen years or so and so it was a bit unusual.  We gathered everything valuable and portable that we did not want to have to go into the next county to recover and then set about getting the cats to safety.  They have three cats, two boys and a kind of rescue female,  but none of them wanted to cooperate and so for a while three adults and a teenager ran around the house trying to corral three cats.

Tom

Gerry

Sasha

When they say something is as difficult as herding cats, there never was a truer saying.  The storm was approaching fast and we really did not want to spend  too much time persuading reluctant cats that they really needed to come down with us.   After a short struggle, we had two of them in a safe place, but Gerry had decided he was not going allow himself to be captured if it was the last thing he did.  Since that may well have been the case if he was not captured, TG in particular, who is very fond of his cats, was getting more and more desperate to get him under lock and key. Between us we finally managed to catch him, but only by stationing ourselves in every doorway until he was finally caught and bundled into the basement.
Whilst we were all rather alarmed at the prospect of the house being destroyed, TG was even more so because he realised that if the tornado struck the house, one of the major casualties would be his rather extensive comic book collection.  In the end we persuaded him to leave them to the fates, on the grounds that we would rather he was safe, because unlike himself, comics could be replaced.  He reluctantly agreed and stopped trying to gather as many as he could carry and we all stayed down in the basement.

The basement of the family’s home is not a dank bare walled room, but a normal floor of their house, consisting of three bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room and just one bare room where the furnace is. When we stay there, we sleep in one of the basement bedrooms.  The other two are set up as studies, one of which was now acting as a cat shelter for the female cat, Sasha, whilst the other two, Tom and Gerry, were in the bathroom.

In the basement living room there is a TV, with at least a 70 inch screen, where we could watch the progress of the storm courtesy of the weather network which takes over all the local channels during this kind of emergency situation. This showed us the radar map and the predictions of where the storm was heading. It was heading straight towards us!

It is amazing how interesting a weather report can become when it contains a tornado prediction with you in its path.

It got progressively darker until the small basement windows showed nothing but night black sky and the tension increased a notch when the local sirens went off outside.  This is the last of the warnings and it means the tornado is imminent.  It was a bit like living through WWII all over again and expecting an air raid. Not that I recall that very well other than a sense of dread whenever I hear sirens coupled with  the stories my parents told, describing what happened.

During our nail biting wait, fortunately for us, the tornado slowly veered south of us and went through a less well populated area. You cannot imagine the relief we felt, but we still needed to keep hunkered down because under those conditions a new tornado can form at any time, so we stayed in the basement until the all clear was announced locally and we could return to normal life.

One worrying aspect of this was that TS was at work, over towards Kansas City and was due to come home from work at around the time of the tornado and his route home took him right through its path.  TS was well aware of the storm and its path, having seen the warning from his own phone and no doubt from the local warning service and so waited for the all clear before starting for home.
It must have been rather worrying for him too, because he would have seen the weather maps and understood where the tornado was headed, but TDIL had been able to keep him up to date on what was happening back at the ranch.  Once the tornado had passed he set out for home and on his way saw a lot of the destruction, where trees and power lines had been ripped up.  Besides the power cables, the most impressive thing he recalled seeing was a totally mangled road sign which gave him an idea of the ferocity of the storm.   To everyone's relief, he soon arrived home safely and was interested to hear our experience of events, particularly the cat chase.

This picture was taken a few days later and they are brand new.  Showing how quickly the services respond to a disaster, but on the day TS came by, every one of these were broken.

The following morning we started to see the damage reports and it was pretty drastic.

We were half way between Lake Clinton and where it says Lawrence on this map. Bottom left.

Tornadoes can be very narrow at the base and so leave a thin trail of destruction with two houses in its path remaining undamaged whilst the one in between them was totally destroyed, but this one was almost a mile wide in places and probably contained more than one funnel cloud that had touched down inside the wall cloud that surrounded it.  A wall cloud is a distinct shaped, circular cloud which can obscure the actual supercell from view from both a visual and radar images of  the tornado.

This is a picture of the Lawrence tornado.  You can only see the wall cloud, not the actual funnel cloud that does all the damage.

 When we were there a few years before and another tornado was heading our way, I did a lot of research on the subject and did a short talk on the subject for my U3A science group when I got home, so I understand something of what is going on during these storms.
That particular year it petered out long before  before reaching our district, but it gave Oklahoma City a real pasting before dispersing and several people were killed.

Tornadoes are measured on the EF scale, a scale created by the meteorologist Ted Fugita, starting with EF zero at the bottom of the scale, with wind speeds around 65-85mph, up to EF 5 being over 200mph.  Anything above that, you really don’t care exactly how fast the wind is blowing and no one bothers to try to make accurate measurements, although it has been claimed that at one time, one was clocked at 300mph .

This is EF 2 damage

The Lawrence one was recorded as an EF4, which is anything from 166 - 200mph and some of the areas it had struck looked like pictures of the Somme at the end of WWI, with trees stripped bare, left with only broken branches, witness to the ferocity of the wind.
Fortunately the district the tornado passed through had wide open spaces between the houses so only a few homes were destroyed, but destroyed was an understatement for some. Whilst several houses had roofs and even the whole top floor removed, some were just a hole in the ground where the basement was left behind with the entire house in pieces that were scattered over a half mile.

This disaster site was a market garden with all the greenhouses destroyed and the owners home damaged beyond repair. 

This building was shifted off its foundations, leaving an open basement

Some of the damage to a building in Linwood.  EF 4 winds are dangerous!

 After all that excitement was over, the weather improved and it became warmer, although not as warm as normal for late May in Kansas and life returned to normal, until it was time for our trip .