Ah cool, good to see you got power back up, V!
And thanks, peeps, everything was okay. Interesting story, though. I saw my first real-life tornado, and didn't even know it.
The rain was falling straight down, very calmly. Middle of the afternoon, but seemed like evening with the clouds and fog in the rain. Tornado warning sirens started going off, and our operator went over the PA and announced that there was a tornado warning in effect and everyone needed to go into the basement.
Myself and a few other adventurous souls (all smokers, ironically) went outside to the garage and watched. One of the guys with us is also the weatherman on one of our local TV stations, so he had a bit of a keen eye on what was going on.
So the rain is falling straight down, a little heavy, not too much lightening. Seemed WAY too calm for a tornado warning.
Tim, the weatherman dude, says "No, this is definitely a tornado warning." He steps into the rain with me and we're looking up at the sky, and it looks like the clouds are going in two different directions.
Tim goes "Holy s*&# we're right in the middle of it."
On queue, the wind picks up and in ZERO time flat, the rain goes from straight down to
horizontal. Tim and I run back into the garage with everyone else, and we all start to stare at it. The change was amazing, it looks like a hurricane just landed on us out of nowhere. We watched a tree get torn in half by the wind, and saw from outside the view area of the garage this HUGE plastic (and very heavy) garbage can drift by like a leave, eventually landing in the parking lot across the street.
"We might want to get inside now," Tim says.
Fog lands as fast as the wind did, and visibility becomes practically zero. We can no longer see the lot across the street, it's nothing but a wall of horizontal rain, fog, and debris.
I couldn't go inside, it was too amazing to watch. After a few minutes it died down, and almost just as quickly turned back to a calm rain.
Found out a few minutes later from the news report that the spot I was staring at (but couldn't actually see at the time) in the lot across the street was the exact spot that the tornado actually touched down, and began moving away from my location for a hundred meters or so, then picked back up and dissipated.
Intense. Moreso that if it had decided to go in the opposite direction, I'd have been brought somewhere other than Kansas.
