Even though I grew up in Illinois, I only once came close enough to a tornado (or had a tornado come close enough to me) to actually see any damage locally from it. When I was in about 4th grade, we were herded into the basement of the grade school as we had been for drills, but we knew this one was for real. Sure enough, the Howard Johnson's roof got torn off only a mile or so from the school.
We had some tornadoes pass last night, and while I am not brave enough to have video to show you, I did get some interesting audio from inside the storm shelter. Now, I may be a coward about tornadoes, by my Oklahoma-born-and-bred husband is not. The tornado warnings kept us in the storm shelter (legitimately) for over an hour. The banging you hear is the hail hitting the storm shelter door. This is what it sounded like, not once, but multiple times:
(There is no video, just audio. Close your eyes for the video of what the inside of a dark storm shelter looks like ;).
Technically, we are just south of "Tornado Alley." According to the Weather Channel, Tulsa is the 6th most dangerous city for tornadoes and Oklahoma City is the 7th, but because it is drier where were we are, we are supposed to miss the worst of it.
Thankfully, there was no damage and no lives lost from this storm locally. The grapevines all survived just fine. The hail was worse north of us.
