We're not in Kansas, Auntie Em

Tornado sky.


There were only four of us at knitting this week. Nine of us were trapped in towns that had been hit by tornadoes.


When Sissy and I got to class we found Teacher on the phone, talking to friends and relatives, getting updates about who was safe and what homes had been destroyed. Sissy and I started calling the missing Knitwits to make sure they were okay.


The Queen answered immediately, sounded a bit shaken, but said she and her family were okay. They had no power but they were okay. She saw one of the tornadoes hit down across the street from her shop.


B sounded just as shaken as the Queen. She had tried to get to her mother and couldn't get through. The roads had been closed, filled with downed trees and power lines. She had talked to her mom, found out she was okay but her house had been destroyed. It had been hit by the tornado.


C was okay, PW was okay, and S was okay. That's all we could find. We couldn't get in touch with the other four. Phone lines and cell towers had been knocked down, so calls weren't able to go through.


It was nerve wracking, worrying about friends in devastated areas.


M came into class and said she decided to come because it was just as safe at knitting as it was sitting at home.
Then we started hearing updates that another storm cell was moving into the area. 

We kept going outside to look at the sky.

And found black skies, and lightning, and rumbles as these wicked thunderstorms rolled through, bubbling and boiling their way across the state.

Teacher was hanging around since she couldn't get home. Closed roads.

So we stayed with her for awhile, keeping her company and trying to get in touch with our four missing friends.

Until finally the skies grew dark enough to scare us and send us scurrying home. 

As M and I drove back to our hometown we kept seeing suspicious looking clouds. Clouds that looked like they were trying to form funnels. See the blue funnel shape dropping from the sky in the picture above? That got much bigger as we drove on and then we lost it behind some trees.

I don't think it formed into anything that touched ground since there were no news reports of it hitting ground in that town.
The clouds continued to brew and blow after I got home.

The Man, K, and I moved all the patio furniture into the garage and then I was free to start shooting the incredible sky. 

Colors like I've not seen before. Yellow. Greenish-orange. Bizarre and not normal colors.

My neighbor across the street came over to get me and hauled me up to the top of her driveway so I could take pictures of our house, bathed in a yellow-orange light from the clouds. We chatted a few minutes until the rain got fat and heavy and stung as it hit us.

Time to run away, Dorothy, storms a-comin'.

Comments

  1. Great photos Cheryl! Yes...very scary! My friend Vincent was at my house during all of this and he is from the Springfield area. He left around 4:30...Thank God because it had already hit that area. He was in shock driving home but thankfully his house is ok. Many places he would visit in downtown Springfield were gone! So sad. We are SO blessed!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, my - I remember it suddenly got VERY still - that was the creepiest thing. And the sky looking so weird. The storm never seemed that bad - plenty of lightning, but just rumblings - no loud thunder. And the rain wasn't terrible. It was the sky. That was scary. I was looking for funnel-y cloud formations, like you.

    ReplyDelete
  3. wow, those pictures of the sky are incredible. We didn't even know anything was going on down here. No rain or anything all evening and didn't realize until we turned on the news.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment