by John Hines
(Polk, Ohio USA)
I am a storm spotter/chaser whose interest came about partly because of two brushes with tornadoes years ago when I was much younger. The first experience was when I was a youngster in the mid 1970’s and the second experience was during an intense evening storm in the mid 1980’s. This experience really impressed upon me how quickly they can come and go.
The evening of the twister, we had gone to bed upstairs and I don’t think we had been up there for half an hour when the rain suddenly seemed to subside and there seemed to be intense lightning without thunder, then nearly out of nowhere came the roar. I know some people describe the sound of a twister in many different ways. In this case, it really was an extremely loud roar that intensified from almost “nothing” in a matter of seconds. We got out of bed and everyone in the house ran down the stairway from the second floor, on our way to the basement. You could feel the house start to shift and hear the groaning and cracking sounds of the wood frame even while trying to get downstairs. But we never made it to the basement. By the time we reached the kitchen (the basement stairway was off of the kitchen), the twister was already past our house and roaring onward. You could hear all kinds of sounds outside…things smashing around, hitting the house, and other sounds that were undescribable. Then, it was gone and all that was left was the sound of light drizzle and occasional thunder. The whole thing happened and was over that quickly and we never had time to get to shelter. We couldn’t see much of anything in the darkness but as daylight hit, many hours later, we could go outside and see the damage. Our house was largely spared although significantly damaged. Our neighbor’s house across the street was gone. In addition, a very large tree that was beside their house was completely gone with no sign of it anywhere. To the left of our house were several houses that were utterly destroyed. The upper section of one house was literally on its side on the street. The roadway was completely closed due to all the debris from damaged and destroyed structures. The usual “gawkers” arrived in town before very long.
We were extremely fortunate. Our house was damaged and needed repairs but at least we still had a house. The most striking thing about the experience was how fast the twister came out of nowhere and passed through. We never got a warning blast on the town siren and, had the twister been on a direct-path to our house, none of us would have made it to shelter in time. We ran down the stairway and made it as far as the kitchen before the twister had already passed and moved on.