French doors, that once led from the breakfast nook of my brother’s home to his backyard, lay in a pile of debris after a tornado’s path went right through the home on January 7, 2008. No portion of his home remained standing, except for the toilet in the guest bathroom. The homes on either side remained standing but were damaged enough to require rebuilding. My brother’s family re-built and were moved back in four months later by mid-May of 2008. The brown home you see on the left in the far background (blue tarp on roof) was finally demolished back in April of this year.
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I love your site and you seem like a really cool person. Hope your brother was ok.
Wow that is sad! I hope everyone was okay.
I remember that particular day. And the photos are something else.
A perfect fit for Photo Friday, wow, the destruction.
I find tornados the most horrifying of all natural disasters. Nothing comes close. They do not strike where I live. I also find hurricanes a horrifying concept because you have six months where they can strike if you are in the gulf or SE east coast. Ditto their not being a factor in my life here. We have quakes (been thru four large ones bigger than 6.2 – one was 7.1). We also have volcano’s, and the possibility of massive tusnami’s. So I fear what does NOT occur here.
I think people in the mid west would list earthquakes as the most horrifying of all potential natural disasters because they do not commonly strike there – though New Madras fault is a ticking nuke of a disaster in waiting.
I was once on a business trip in Topeka, and the client locals sat around at lunch one day talking about “fun and cute sized” tornado’s they had witnessed. Ohmygod. One sight of anything that even seems like a tornado and I am out of there so fast it isn’t funny. They then talked about earthquakes as being the most horrifying science fiction like thing of terror that they could imagine. They thing is the strike once every 20 years or so (a good thing – releases movement and keeps stress from building up). It is bad when they do not strike that often as in the Riverside county area of LA and the Hayward fault in the east bay hills of San Francisco. Now THAT is not a fun thought.
But tornados – can strike over a 3-5 month period in the tornado alley area – and you have little warning though a could a days before you know yet another front is coming that could produce a tornado in theory. I could not stand that suspense. And it is only a bit less with hurricanes. You do know days and days before that something formed and then you watch the twists and turns of the path develop day by day, and then hour by hour.
I will take quakes (about every 2000-5000 years here we have a KILLER 9-10 quake that shatters the entire coastline of puget sound). Last deadly tsunami was 1700 (I think) on the coast. Indians still remember it. So do the Japanese as a tsunami from the under seas quake also sent a deadly tsunami there.