Saturday Afternoon Destruction

The total randomness of natural disasters never ceases to amaze me. April 16, 2011 will live in infamy in North Carolina for the historic collection of tornados that arbitrarily steamrolled through roughly half of the entire state. As is typical with these deals, the assessment of the total damage won’t be complete for awhile. For example, when I went to bed the night of the tornadoes, I had never heard of Bertie County, NC and I have lived in this state since November, 1988. When I woke up Sunday morning, the news reported that 11 people died in this dirt-poor farming county when an F3 rolled through toward the end of the long day.

It is sort of surreal to go through this sort of thing first-hand and to try to comprehend and make sense of it – I can’t figure it out and certainly can’t make sense of it.

Like why were there no casualties and only minor injuries at a packed Lowe’s Store which was completely destroyed in Sanford in Lee County in one of the hardest hit areas of the storms? Why did the storms essentially pass on Orange and Durham Counties while Wake, Alamance, and Person Counties got hit? Why did this huge oak tree fall on and crush four precious Hispanic children (between 6 months and 9 years old) huddled in a closet in a mobile home park in Raleigh?

Those questions are too big for me.  I understand that those that have some sort of faith can probably get some sort of answers to those questions. All I am left with is pondering fate, chance, and some really tragically bad luck.

Executive Summary: For those that just want to cut to the chase:

• We were under a Tornado Warning in Orange County and several tornados touched down and did damage in neighboring counties.
• In Hillsborough, we received some fairly heavy rain and thunderstorms – but nothing unlike what we get several times a month between May and September.
• Winds were stiff but no trees or major branches fell. No property damage was absorbed whatsoever.
• I rode the rough stuff out enveloped by couch cushions in my kitchen pantry.
• It was all over by 3:45 PM or so. We were very fortunate – many others weren’t.

The Run-Up: These days we have all of this technology that allows us to predict and project these storms. We have a veritable arms race of TV stations all trumpeting their latest and greatest variations of Doppler Radar. We have websites dedicated to weather and severe storm tracking.

All this information is valuable and life-saving of course. But it is kind of different to know ahead of time that some nasty stuff that could really impact your life is about to happen – and then to watch it play out on TV and the Net – in real time in front of your eyes.

By Friday evening, our entire area was deemed to be in Moderate Risk. By 11:00 AM Saturday, we were upgraded (downgraded?) to be in High Risk Territory. For me, it was looking like, one way or the other, things would be over by 3:30 or so. 

This Is Getting Interesting: By about 2:45 PM, there were three bands of tornado-producing super-cell storms that were hurtling toward  me at about 65 MPH. A tornado had already hit the ground with damage reported in Burlington in Alamance County (25 miles southwest of me) and another one had caused damage in Roxboro in Person County (25 miles northeast of me).

The last band of rotation was barreling toward Northern Orange County with the targeted areas including Hillsborough and Schley. This one had me really worried. Schley is entirely too close to my subdivision (about three miles northwest). Additionally, who knows if these three tornados are going to track as the experts predict. It looked like they were all going to miss me, but the margin of error was razor thin. If any of them veered off course, I was going to be in deep doo-doo. My High Noon had arrived.

Around 2:50 I lost cable and Internet and retired to the kitchen pantry with my couch cushions to ride it out.

A Historical Event: The breadth of this swath of storms was pretty awesome. The image below was captured about 3 1/2 hours after my fun was over, but gives you a good perspective of how widespread the tornados were at one point. Looking at this at the time, my impressions were that:

• It looked like a pissed-off cat just clawed the hell out of a map of the Piedmont.
• The Weather Gods must have somehow mistaken North Carolina for Oklahoma. After last Saturday, NC was leading the nation in number of tornadoes in 2011.
• This is an incredibly rare occurrence – you just don’t see that quantity of simultaneous tornado-spawning super cells at one time in North Carolina. I was also freaked out by the almost parallel bands that ran in an almost identical direction from the South Carolina border the whole way into Virginia.

This is the first in a series of posts disconnected observations about this day. The tone is my usual one. Please don’t take that as an indication that I take lightly this tragedy or somehow don’t have empathy for those that have been directly affected.