I was actually in this tornado when I was 12.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novembe...rnado_outbreak
Wikipedia says, "Critical weather information was disseminated in a timely fashion over the NOAA Weather Wire Service (NWWS)." Bullshit. The tornado sirens didn't go off until after the tornado had dissipated. (Okay, I actually edited wikipedia to remove that line). A lot of people never realized that there was a Warning in effect.
I was sitting in the kitchen doing homework with my brother, sister and mother. We lived on the ridgeline of Huntsville Mountain, so the wind always made this disproportionately angry howling sound as it passed over and around the house and down into the valley. It was doing this in these big gusts that night blowing those raindrops that you only get in the Southeast hard against the windows. I don't remember much in the way of lightning. It was a typical stormy southern night, and my mother had turned off the TV so that we would do our homework. Our kitchen had this huge picture glass window twelve feet up, looking out over our yard and Dug Hill Valley (the opposite direction of the tornado's path).
At this time, we all lived under the impression that a tornado would not come up a mountain the size of Huntsville Mountain. This was directly contradicted by recent local history, but it was a comforting delusion, and we didn't question it.
We were all sitting in the kitchen when the wind and rain just stopped. Not flagged, not tapered off, just flat out stopped. There wasn't any discussion. We just all looked at each other then immediately ran for the basement. In retrospect, this is the weirdest part of the whole thing. I've never read about this sudden calm and silence in any other tornado encounter. Usually, the first sign that you are in a tornado is that you are in a tornado. In fact, there's not a lot about other tornado encounters that I recognize. The freight train sound, the excessively eerie sky, I didn't get any of that. The best we can figure is that the leading edge of the tornado somehow hopped over us when it cleared the ridgeline, putting us directly in the eye of the storm. How every single one of us aged 6-43 somehow divined what this meant, I have no idea.
I made it down the stairs a good deal before anyone else. We have a closet in the basement that is specifically reinforced as a storm shelter. My grandad, a noted engineer and architect, designed that house. Supposedly you could have dropped a Mack truck on that shelter without it sustaining any real structural damage. I immediately ran into the other closet. It wasn't entirely my fault. That closet was full of athletic equipment. It wasn't like we were ever going to see a tornado up on top of the mountain, anyways.
I slammed the door shut and pulled tight on the knob. Seconds later, there was an incredible pulling and shrieking from the other side. Several moments after that, I realized it was my little brother. I'd like to say that I was a brave and responsible older brother who immediately let his younger sibling inside when he realized what was going on. But I'm pretty sure I left him out there way longer than I should have.
He blew through the door like a tornado himself and we crawled into a back corner of the closet and listened to furniture moving upstairs. It was a bit like one of those dreams where you're being stalked by some predator just out of sight. Our mother and little sister hadn't come down the stairs. We were alone.
This went on for what felt like several minutes, but was probably subject to the time dilation of fear. My mother came through the door. Me being 12, and my brother being 8, we weren't at all surprised. Parents are invincible, after all. Well, not all parents, but clearly our parents.
I'm not sure how long we were down there. Thinking about it now, I'm not sure us kids were allowed outside until the next morning. The dogs came in, acting very much like nothing had happened. For the longest time I figured they had taken refuge in the garage, finding the best place possible to hide from the storm. Now that I have my own dog, I realize that they probably had no idea that a storm ever happened. They were asleep in the garage, and the humans, for some reason, decided to smash all the windows and throw everything onto the lawn. Humans do these sorts of things. Its best not to question.
My Dad showed up about half an hour later, crying. The trees were down all over our street, and he'd had to park the car and climb over them up the hill. The new (unoccupied) house across the street from ours had been leveled, and that was the only thing he could see as he was climbing: a big empty plot of land where a house used to be. He thought he had lost his entire family. And even the dogs were okay. Everyone was okay, except the finches. The finches lived in the kitchen. They were no longer in the kitchen. Since we never found their cage, it's possible they were blown out the window and out of the cage and out into the sky, where they miraculously flew away unharmed. We'll go with that.
A few years later, I learned just what my mother and sister had been doing upstairs. To this day, I'm not entirely sure how to interpret it. It doesn't sound plausible, and I'm not sure I would believe it if I heard it from any random 12 year old.
What they say is that they didn't make it down the stairs. My little sister was actually blown up against the wall across from the stairwell, pinned upside down as my mother tried desperately to reach her from the stairwell itself. My little sister will tell you this very matter of factly, a small, blonde, somewhat understated girl, she says this nearly without emotion: "yeah, I was upside down. Mom was yelling at me." Then she does this little laugh, and usually everyone else laughs nervously. I just don't know this works. How was she not pelted with debris? On nearby Monte Sano mountain, there's a tree with a shovel stuck in one side and out the other, courtesy of a 1974 tornado that was very similar to the 1989 version. Why wasn't she sucked out into the living room and out over Dug Hill Valley? Why upside down? How? I've never heard of anyone surviving an F4 tornado quite like this. Granted, tornadoes are freaky-ass weird phenomena, and a lot of near supernatural things happen in their passing. The china that our Granny had given my little sister (in care of my mother) was untouched other than that the glass cabinet was full of leaves and mud. The tornado destroyed the ground floor and attic, leaving the second floor (with my room in it) nearly untouched. I'm certainly glad she made it, and for someone who was 6 at the time, she seems to be remarkably psychologically stable. At least as far as our family goes. When asked about any of the above she just says, "I don't know.
There were much worse stories. A family friend was driving down Airport Road when he saw the tornado coming towards him. Realizing that he couldn't get out of the car and to safety in time, he pulled himself down under the dashboard. The car was lifted up into the air and thrown down the road. He lost both his legs and was probably lucky for it.
One kid my age was killed. We shared a piano teacher.
Twenty-two people died in all, and a lot more were injured.
I got lucky. We got lucky. My math homework did not get lucky. I had the best "dog ate my homework" excuse ever.
