Tornado Watch

We woke up this morning to a nice day: birds doing their chirping thing, sun doing its warming-the-earth thing, all good things.  By the time we got to church, it was much the same but with a couple of clouds on the horizon.  After church I noticed an alert on my phone. Tornado watch.  No sweat.*  The watch was for all of Eastern Tennessee, so we might see a storm but nothing major.

*Let's pause for a second and talk about my fear of tornadoes.  I've never lived somewhere with any chance of tornadoes, but I still have nightmares about them every few months.  I always have.  The concept of a tornado terrifies me.  I've never experienced a tornado watch before.  When I say "no sweat," I'm actually sweating quite a bit.  Like a pig.  Like a pig in a tornado.

I mentioned this alert to some people around me and they said, "Eh, no problem; it's the tornado warnings you have to watch out for!"  "Yeah," another agreed.  "It's been several years since we had a tornado around here."  (Several years??  Several?  Shouldn't that be NEVER??)

Later this afternoon I was napping on the couch when I woke to a strange alert noise on my phone.  The screen said: "TORNADO WARNING IN YOUR AREA.  TAKE COVER IMMEDIATELY."  What?  Take cover immediately?  Who says that?  What kind of a place is this?!

"JAMES!"  I holler.  But James is already up, having received the same alert.

"Where do we go?" he asked.

"The bathroom!  The bathtub!  No windows in there!" I scurry inside.  We have no basement, so this is the best place we have.

Me: "James!  I need towels because the tub is wet and I'm not sitting in water!"
James: "Grab what you need, you know, laptops or anything we'd really need."  (I step out long enough to get my laptop and decide I'm more interested in saving myself than anything else.)
Me, from the towel-lined tub: "James!  Get in here!"
James: "Here!  I got your shoes and socks." (James busily preparing as much as he can in the event of tornado destruction around but not including our bathroom.)
Me: "James!  Why are you not in the bathtub??"
James: "I got some water bottles."
Me: "James! I am not dying alone in a bathtub in a tornado!"

James, as it turns out, is much better at emergency preparedness than me.  I, as it turns out, am much better at plain old emergency than him.  We're sitting in our tub with the door safely shut (flying shards of glass - it can happen, you know) when....the power goes out.

James: "Should I open the door so we're not in the dark?"
Me: "You're not going anywhere."

So we sat in the tub in the dark, with winds and thunder and rain loudly pounding our house until the warning was over about 45 minutes later.  We tried to figure out if we can get radio on our phones to hear updates but we don't know what frequency.  We looked up statistics on cities and tornado deaths.  Fortunately, the last time someone in our city died from a tornado was in 1988.

When we come out, we see the sun again within another 15 minutes.  It rained 3" in that storm. The power came on about an hour after it went off.  It was calm for a few hours and then another storm rolled in.

Now it's 11 pm and we've been watching the sky flashing for the last hour or two, with more rain and thunder.  In the last 15 minutes there hasn't been a full second of space between lightning flashes; it's that continuous.  I've never been afraid of rainstorms before, not when I was inside.  It's nice to be curled up and know the storm can't get you.  But wait, what?  It can get you?  And blow you to Oz?  Tornadoes are a thing?  My nightmares were just foreshadowing!?

We just got a few new alerts in our area:  severe/dangerous thunderstorm and areal flood advisory (the tornado watch from this morning is still in effect until 2 am, by the way). The alerts have helpful tips and facts: "This storm is centered in your town.  Move to higher ground," "When driving in roads covered with water: turn around, don't drown," "Expect quarter-sized hail and winds in excess of 60 mph," "Torrential rainfall may lead to flooding," and "Lightning is one of nature's leading killers."  I feel reassured.

*     *     *

Edit: Monday morning. Nobody got blown away to Oz.  There may have been a tornado in our county yesterday after all (we live in Claiborne county) and 10 homes were destroyed in Speedwell, which is about 25 minutes away from us.  There are pictures on that link of the houses.