Unprepared

[The topic for this cycle: Location, Location, Location. No irony intended]

(The Weather Channel, April 16, 2011, North Carolina map)

A helluva storm blew through the South on April 15th and 16th, stomping my old stomping grounds--and Ms. Henny Red's hometown--on the 16th with three tornadoes at once in one locale. Henny's internet and land line phone are still down, but her cell phone is working. She asked me to tell you all that she and her loved ones are safe and unscathed. She's learned how lucky they were. Prediction: some severe weather stories coming up right here from our Henny.

(AP Photo/The Fayetteville Observer, James Robinson)

Raleigh wasn't alone. This storm stalked across the South from Tulsa to Gloucester Court House. Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia all saw devastation, with as many as 44 dead at this early count, with 80 wounded. Arkansas reported hail measured at four inches in diameter on April 15th.

Convection profile over Raleigh (The Weather Channel, April 16th, 2011)

Henny went to her sister's house, where they hunkered down in a hallway. And, yes, she says the report that a tornado sounds like a freight train is true. And the hop-scotching destruction, true. Her sister's house had some relatively minor roof damage, but a block or so away, houses were crushed whole. She says that all her personal experience with tornado warnings over the years had led her to expect the usual: a sighting somewhere reported in the news, some pictures in the newspaper, maybe a power outage. Not whole houses disappearing. Not colleges closing for the semester. Not lives permanently re-directed in a single, random moment. She'd heard of such things, but she wasn't prepared for it.



According to KTLA in Arkansas, in a two day period, there were 241 tornadoes reported, with 50 confirmed.

I had a heads up on this storm. My son phoned Friday from Nashville to say a neighbor's giant trampoline had been blown into the side of his house--seemed major at the time and possibly avoidable. I made a bee-line to my next door neighbor's to beg him to turn his kids' trampoline sail-side down.


By Saturday noon, the Weather Service was startling us silly with loud alarms and warnings to take shelter under a table, in the lowest, centermost area of our house.

Here's irony. The For Sale sign that lives eternally in my front yard has a flyer box with a brochure touting the openness of my house, the light, the windows, windows, windows. Turns out, the safest place in my house is a tiny bathroom that barely provides sitting room for one person. No tables. If you push in a few big cushions from the screened porch for padding, it's standing room only.

While growing up in Greensboro, NC, and attending colleges in the Research Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill), I suffered a recurrent nightmare: tornadoes ringed the horizon and my job was to protect the women, shoo them to prepared shelter, save them from the storms. Not a man in sight to help out. The primary emotional component was helplessness. That dream began with puberty and stalked my nights right into my thirties. Which might explain why I chose a women's college after high school. In graduate school, my shrink-in-training friends had a Freudian field day with my head, and  ya'll can testify that I'm still not quite right to this day.

So there I was squashed in the teensy bathroom on Saturday afternoon. New batteries in the flashlight, check. Candles and lighter, check. Cell phone all charged up, check. Weather radio blaring ear-splitting alarms in a space the size of a utility closet, check. Incipient panic attack, check. Tornadoes spotted mere miles away. No other women around for me to save, but I was on the job. I'd done everything the early warning system and my own worst nightmares had prepared me to do.

Dearest Husband--the retired fighter pilot whose adrenalin glands were marshaled into submission forty-five years ago --he, on the other hand, was tired from moving all the hanging baskets and bird feeders onto the screened porch. He was grumpy from the rapidly dropping barometric pressure. He wanted me to turn the damned radio off so he could take a nap.

All we wound up with at our house was strong gusts of wind. It all shot through at high speed and was gone. The weather today is so beautiful, so sparkling, so sweetly perfect, it'll take your breath.

How do you prepare for something like that?