My opinion? Tornadoes can follow Dorothy to Oz & go and stay way beyond THAT rainbow.

Never thought much about weather for most of my life. Sometimes the sun shone, sometimes it rained, February would be wet and gray and then there even would sometimes be “Föhnstürme” – blizzard kinda storms in the mountains and these could get pretty windy and gave an adventurous feeling when trying to leave the hotel of my aunt to get across the little street to the chalet of my aunt and one had to hold on to everything solid because the wind could blow you off your feet, especially deep in winter when snow was packed to slick and ice like surfaces.

But never would it scare me. Never did I feel unsafe.

Not until I came to the USA.

Of course, being me and living the life I live, I managed to be at home alone when I had my first encounter with a twister which before was nothing but a thing out of Hollywood and The Wizzard of Oz.

It was one of these days when we lived in Shoreview, a town about 20 miles outside of Minneapolis and I was idly working away my day on the computer and at some point, shortly after 2 pm I happened to look outside through the opened big glass windows from our balcony and noticed that the sunshine had changed to an eery green light. It was strong, so strong! And oddly calm. Never had I seen something the like and out of a gut feeling I turned on the TV and turned to the weather channel.

And there it was, storm tracking and they were talking about tornado warning and winds of 77 mph and while they were talking outside the winds suddenly were taking on life and the alarms began to sound and the woman on TV said, “… and in about 3 minutes it will pass Shoreview, go for shelter now” and she barely said so when the alarms started to sound and at the same moment power went out, all 3 computers and the TV died in one split second and now the winds REALLY became audible and they grew exponentially in strength and loudness.

HA! There were no 3 minutes. It was HERE.

Now the only thing I knew about a situation like this is that it’s safest to go to the basement. But if I would want to do so I had to either take the elevator which I really didn’t think an intelligent idea right now or walk by the huge glass windows in the hall and leading down the stairs. I was torn. But, I knew that I should go at least to the middle of the house and away of all the glass in our apartment. The winds by now had reached howling sounds and the vertical blinds from the windows where flapping loudly. So I took my chances and began heading towards the hallway, I moved quickly to the door and pushed the handle down and pulled… and pulled… and could NOT open the door! Due to having the big balcony doors open, so much air had been sucked out of the room that there was now a strong vacuum, so strong that I was absolutely unable to open the door to the hallway.

Now I got scared.

I could have gone into our bathroom into the tub, but for some reason this either didn’t come to mind or I didn’t think it that safe around all that breakable porcelaine. Our apartment consisted of a U shaped layout were each side of the U was a room and the curve was a little hallway leading to the apartment door. So I crouched behind that wall, starting to count. The winds now sounded more and more like a train was just about to hit our rooms and I felt how the walls and ground began to vibrate slightly. And I counted, and crouched as low as I could. And it didn’t seem to end, not to end. These winds and the wild flapping of the blinds. I wished it so badly just to be over but time became stickier than honey.

Eventually it subsided and within a few minutes the winds died surprisingly quick and soon all was quiet and calm and the light outside turned normal again. Soon after I went outside to see how close the storm really had been and yes, it had touched down in the street we lived in but we were lucky, it was only a slight touch-down and it had mainly wandered exactly along the street – many trees where broken and some houses showed slight damage but nothing too heavy. The apartment block we lived in was shaped like an L and our apartment was the leg that faced away from the street, along the street some balconies of the block were damaged and the one tree in front of our balcony looked somewhat slightly twisted and even though it was not visibly broken the tree went in shock and just died away after that day.

It took 3 days until we got our power back and ever since my alarm bells go off when the sky turns green. Up in Minneapolis it seemed that once a year there was tornado season but here in beautiful Kansas it seems to be a constant threat during 3/4 of the year – and in the last 1/4 of the year we can get ice storms ;-)

Another reason for the constant unease when a storm approaches is that the media here in the USA is really good in working up your potential fears by feeding you constantly the NATURE THREATENS HUMANITYmessage with movies of tornadoes, twisters, earth quakes, tidal waves, terror attacks and whatnot. The easy part with THIS is that you can simply switch channels. But you can not escape this easily the storms itself. And yes, we had another one of them today in Kansas City. So having Dorothy wanting to go far away during a tornado I can understand more than just a little.

Technorati Tags: challenges, wizard of oz, dorothy, tornado, twister, weather, storms