2 posts tagged “tornado”
So remember how I said I'd have stuff to talk about when I got back to New York? I kind of lied.
I don't know if you've been following the news or anything, but the midwest has been hammered by storms these past two weeks, with more still coming. I live in a teeny weeny town that straddles the Fox River in Kane County, Illinois. We've been getting a lot of rain and today was no different. Only today there was a fuck ton of it, and it's still pouring. It's not even 7:00pm and it's as dark as it is around 10:00pm.
Our town has one bridge. It's under construction right now. A bit down the river are three islands with three foot bridges connecting them together and to the mainland. Crossing the bridge today after the first downpour, I noticed something peculiar. The islands were gone. Just gone. Flooded over. I've lived in Batavia for all twenty years I've been alive and the islands haver never been swallowed by the river. Not even close. There are lower islands farther south which are constantly sinking and rising out of the river, but not our islands.
Oh, we were also hit by a few tornadoes. The elementary schools kept their children at school late rather than risk sending them home in the downpour and wind. Trees are down all over and my dog is terrified. I was actually a few counties north when they came and the poor dog had to weather it all by herself. We knew there'd been tornadoes by the time we were coming home and the close we got to home, the more awful it looked. Streets closed, trees down, power out. But, thankful my street was largely spared, our recycling bins were just blown around and some smaller branches were down.
On top of all this, the van broke down. And we need it to drive to New York on Saturday. Ugh. I just hope we can still leave on time and wont get held up by any of the flooding in Ohio.
What's the most extreme weather you've been in? A memorable storm? Heat wave? Or something else?
Having survived the 2006 Blizzard in New York City without even batting an eyelash (those Traverse City winters were good for something), and the 1995 Chicago heatwave, the most terrefying weather I've ever encountered was the tornado.
Tornados in and of themselves are scary, but imagine being an 11-year-old girl at Girl Scout Camp living in a teepee for the week when one of the worst storms to rip through Rockford, Illinois crosses front and center over your campground. My unit was in a new campground that hadn't been used before. We had temporary outhouses and now storm shelter. The closest stormshelter was a good 1000 yards away, on the next hill with a dramatic valley between.
I remember sitting in the next unit over looking at the sky. There was a cloud shaped like a hand pointing. It was pointing in the direction the storm was moving, and five minutes later, it started rain. The rain wasn't bad, it was standard rain and we kept to original schedule. We went to bed in our teepees as thunder and lightning drew nearer.
An hour later, our teepee wasn't doing so well with the wind and the rain. It was slowly shrinking as the support beams were pushed closer together. The floor was flooding and the girl who had until then slept in the middle, had already climbed into my friend Amanda's sleepingbag. Then a flashlight approached with a counselor behind. She yelled at us to get our shoes on and to move. It was dark, we had only two flashlights for a unit of 21 girls and 4 counselors. We formed a line and began to run for the next campsite. The valley was flooded, and the slopes were slippery. We slid down into thigh-high water and grabbed onto whatever plants we could to crawl up the other side.
The storm shelter was already full with our neighbors. 47 girls and 9 counselors in a space designed for 25. At night. With no place to sleep and nowhere to go. My unit was thoroughly soaked and we would spend the night that way. We never went into the shelter's tornado hold, but through the night we heard the wind pick up. I was asleep on the floor when the tornado ripped by. It woke me up, and almost everyone was crying. We all wanted to go home.
And then it was all over. The tornado was gone, the rain stopped, and that was it. We emerged and looked at the wreckage around us. A tree had fallen on one of the site's tents, and the latrines were engulfed in the branches of another down tree. Power was out. Worse, so was the water. I was given somebody elses underwear and shirt to sleep in for the next few hours. We slept two to a cot with no blankets or sleepingbags.
In the morning, everyone had to fork over all our water so the cafeteria could cook us meager food. Trees were down everywhere and everyone was cowed into a eerie silence. I was just glad I that that was my last day at camp.
