Thursday, May 13, 2010

Storms, Storms, Go Away

The time? 5 am. The place? My home. Me, I'm sound asleep all nice and comfy. A little warm but not too bad. I hear something in the distance. It's the telephone. It doesn't really wake me but it does arouse me somewhat. A minute or two later I hear another noise. Some sort of beeping. It's my answering machine. I wake up and look at the clock. 4:37. "Who in the world is leaving a message at 5 am?" I ask myself. I get up and press play. "This is a weather alert. A Severe Thunderstorm Warning has been issued for your area". Crap. I turn on the tv and change the channel from FNC to my local news. Storms are starting to push through Tulsa. A few miles from me, but they're moving so fast that the National Weather Service decided to issue a warning for my area. The weatherman says that the storms will be in my area at 5:08 am. "The NWS is concerned that some areas could receive winds up to 90mph. Crap. I open my door and see a few flashes of lighting in the distance. Then the winds start to pick up. At 5:08, on the nose, a huge gust of wind hits. It lasts less than 30 seconds and is gone. Power flashes off and on for the next couple of minutes. Off and on. Off and on. The storms blows through and all that happens to me is my trash cans get pushed around a bit. But other areas aren't so lucky. South Tulsa seems to get the worst of it. Strong straight lines winds tear through and rip roofs off homes, blow car ports around and up root entire trees. It looks like a tornado had ripped through. Nobody is injured but there is quite a bit of damage.

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