Break from Home Construction ....

While I was watching an episode of Emma (an anime based on a manga series) last night, the Russian amazingly heard a tornado warning siren outside of our apartment. Since we moved to this state, we learned that every first Wednesday, they will do a test-siren. But last night's siren was happening at around 8.45 PM, so it was unlikely to be a test one.

We paused the movie and flipped over to live TV and started looking for news regarding the weather - and it was not hard to find. The weather was so bad that every channel was showing a weather map.

As it turned out, the county we are in was under a Tornado Warning the rotating cloud (and possible tornado) was predicted to pass our area exactly! The wind was already blowing really hard and we could hear the thunderstorm approaching, and saw the spectacular lightning show (check out the photos below). The TV kept suggesting that we go to a shelter, such as hiding in a basement if we had one.

The Russian got really worried and tense. He saw from the map that the storm was going to pass our area diagonally, from southwest to northeast (lower-left of the map, to upper-right of the map). So if we drove east, far enough ahead of the storm, and then turned downwards (south) then we could avoid the whole thing and possibly save our lives! Instead of spending the next 45 minutes in the smelly garbage room downstairs (probably the safest place in our apartment building, unfortunately), we decided to abandon our apartment and started driving north. Actually, this was a terrible idea because, as it turned out, we went outside precisely at the moment while the tornado cloud was approaching us - but since we knew we had some time to drive out of its way, we decided to take our chances.

After 45 minutes of driving in a big circle southwards to run away from impending doom, and listening tensely to the live news reports from inside our car, our butts were saved. Good thing, nothing bad happened to our apartment either - even though there were several houses in nearby cities which were hit and suffered damage.

The weather service confirmed today that an F1 tornado hit a little bit west of us. A guy on the news last night was also saying he could see a quarter-mile-wide tornado a little bit north of us, although we aren't sure if that was accurate. But anyway, there was definitely some bad weather going on last night, and we missed it, thankfully.

We checked on our home construction site today, just to see if anything had happened, and it seems everything there was OK. Our new neighborhood seems to have survived its first bad storm.

We got a chance to take some pictures of the sky when we got back to our apartment.




and this amazing video of the tail end of the lightning show, as it was moving away from us: