Tornado

The tornado hit early Sunday morning (Saturday night) at around 2am. The red star on the map is near where we live. I circled the areas where the beast touched down in blue. I'm not so sure of that spot on the far right, but I know it was somewhere along Bell Road in the north end of Newburgh.



We're fine. We got a lot of wind and rain and lightning, but no big damage in town. I woke up to the storm siren at 1:45am and turned on the tv. The tornado warning was already in effect and they were telling everyone to go to their basements. I got Neil up and scooped the sleeping Arthur off the bed (Neil found Penny) and we went down to the basement (how nice to have one!) to wait until the wind died down. It got pretty loud for a while. As far as I know, nobody reported seeing the funnel cloud - on the news at 2am they kept calling it a "radar-indicated" tornado. Obviously it was there, but since it was night and all, it wasn't visible unless the lightning lit up the sky. There was a lot of lightning...but not many storm chasers, I guess.

After the threat was over, we went back to bed. Well, Neil went back to bed. I was all worked up (tornados being the theme of many a recurring nightmare) and my stomach was all irritable so I ate dry Cheerios and watched the lightning for a while. Eventually I went to sleep...and was awakened at 9am or something by my parents calling to make sure we were still here. We didn't know what the damage was since we had turned off the tv at around 2:15 or 2:30. Kind of shocking to know that it had made the national news! That made me very glad that I had convinced Neil and Arthur to go down to the basement! ;-)

Photo #16 in slide show 1 below shows eerie evidence of the storm's presence. For some reason, that photo scares me more than most of the others -- it's almost like a beautifully rendered signature. Silent and terrifying.

Slide show 1

Slide show 2

Slide show 3

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