Living In Tornado Alley

Dallas Tornado

I am not a native Texan.  Never was, never will be.  But everyone in my family is except for my two sons and myself.  I never saw a tornado or even hail when I was growing up.  Winters were cold and snowy. Spring brought rain without severe weather, summers were drenched in humidity, and in fall, there was a slight chill in the air and the smell of burning leaves.  Occasionally, late summer might bring leftover hurricane winds and pummeling rain.  But no tornados.

Growing up, I would hear stories of tornados ripping through parts of Dallas and causing massive destruction.  My family was always deep in drama and would interject things like the pouring rains generated by the severe weather would turn the Trinity River into "A Walking Dog."  The flooding from the Trinity would generate a call to Noah and the animals to head for safety.  If you are a long time resident of the DFW area, you may recall these events to be somewhat true.  If you have only seen the Trinity River during the norm, it is hard to believe that it could ever be more than a trickle of a river.  But the stories about deadly tornado destruction were true.

Now that I had 2 young kids of my own, I was very aware of Texas weather.  I respected tornado season.  I paid close attention to weather conditions, especially during the spring-summer and fall months.   The weather could and did change in the blink of an eye.  I had been caught in a terrible storm the previous summer in the Cotton Bowl.  Ross Perot arranged a huge welcome home affair for returning POWS at the end of the Vietnam conflict.  It was a star-studded event.  It was held in the very much open and exposed Cotton Bowl Stadium.  It was scorching, and without any, previous warning a horrendous storm hit Dallas and the suburbs.  Everything that could happen did—torrential rain, high winds, hail, lightning, flash flooding, and funnel clouds.  And I was stuck in the Cotton Bowl, a metal and concrete lightning rod.  It was terrifying, and it all happened so quickly that it was just incredible.  That's where I learned to respect Texas weather.  After living there for a while, you become keen on a certain "feeling" in the atmosphere that bad storms could be brewing.

When working at Employers Insurance in downtown Dallas one summer day, the sky turned pitch black.  The street lights came on.  Then the sky turned a greenish-black, and baseball-sized hail started falling from the sky.  My kids were in daycare.  The storm came from across the Trinity through Dallas and heading towards Mesquite, where my kids were.  We were not allowed to use the phones until the storm had passed.  The wind and hail and lightning and rain beat the downtown area, and then it moved on.

The storm moved on towards where my kids were.  I didn't call yet because I knew that Penny and Carol would be struggling to ensure that all of the kids were secured as much as possible.  If you didn't have a storm shelter, you had to hope for a miracle that the storm would pass you by.  And it did, but it had skipped around with funnels touching down briefly and then moving on.  When it was over, there would be an area wide sigh of relief.

After those two bad storms, I could no longer sleep on any night that it was storming.  I was a little paranoid.  During the summer months, the storms were bad enough to generate warnings from the tornado sirens.  When it happened, I would become a nervous wreck.  We lived on the second floor.  The only thing that I could do was pick my kids up, stuff them in the walk-in closet, and layer them with pillows and blankets.  They were never scared, but I was a wreck.  The tornado sirens just completely unnerved me.  And that has never changed.

One stormy night I had stuffed my kids in the closet and covered them.  The sirens were blasting.  They would continue to blare loudly until the danger or the tornado warning had expired.  I was sitting with them in the closet.  I had just gone out to the window to peek out.  Torrential rain and the wind was bending the tops of trees down.  I ran back into the closet.  I grabbed each child and held on to them as best as I could.  No sooner had I done that than the walls of the closet looked like they were breathing in and out.  The air pressure was changing.  When I saw the walls doing that, I was expecting all hell to break loose.   Turns out the funnel actually did form but quickly went back into the cloud, and it moved on.

That was the weirdest thing that I had ever seen.  And I would see that and the black-green sky several times over the years.

http://www.homefacts.com/tornadoes/Texas/Dallas-County/Dallas.html

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