When I was eight years old, my family spent the month of July visiting my stepfather’s parents on their farm outside of Wichita Kansas. One evening, my sister and I were bathing, supervised by our mom. We had just noticed lighting through the bathroom window, when my step-grandmother burst into the bathroom grabbed my sister out of the tub and told my mom to wrap me in a towel and follow her.
We were outside and sprinting around the house in seconds. If I close my eyes I can still feel the small pieces of debris scraping up my arms and the grip my mom had on my arm that would leave a mark that lasted two weeks. When we got to the cellar, we braced ourselves while mom struggled with the chain on the doors. Reflexively I looked up as a few bolts of lighting struck nearby, in quick succession and made my wet curls crackle. In the seconds before I was literally tossed into the hole in the ground, I saw a massive cloud of debris that at first I thought was a “just” a massive dust cloud. But when my eyes widened, I saw the immense, crooked, column above the cloud propelling the cloud directly at my step-grandparent’s barn.
The barn didn’t survive the hour. Luckily, it had long been empty of livestock or anything big enough smash in the roof or walls when it was propelled into the house. Five years later the farm house would be leveled by yet another tornado and my step-grandparents would sell the farm and moved into an apartment complex.
What’s your most notable extreme weather story?
(Image: Supercell)
