[silver_pilate]

Hehe,

I grew up with that kinda stuff. I've been carried to the basement while I was asleep in the middle of the night like you see at the begining of the movie Twister. I've seen hail stones the size of grapefruit. I've seen it hail golf ball size hail for two hours straight. The drains of the underpasses clogged up with ice and the underpasses filled with water and hail stones. Cars were floating in what looked to be a giant slushy. That same storm burried cars under overpasses. Seriously. They stopped under the overpass to get some protection, and the hail drifted up like snow. It burried the cars up to the roofs. They had to get bulldozers to get them out. The hail storm that ripped through Fort Worth in 1995 had light-bulb size stones with spikes like a mace. A stone actually punched through the hood of a parked car.

I won't lie to you. As many storms and tornados as I've seen, they still scare the living piss out of me. But it also gives a huge rush. The main thing is knowing what signs to look for. You gotta read the sky to know what's going on. Otherwise, they'll catch you with your pants down. The neighbor's house that got hit a couple of years back...they were napping on Sunday afternoon. The both heard the noise at the same time and Robert yelled at his wife to get in a closet. They both jumped into the same closet about 2 seconds before the twister hit. It was the only part of the house left fully standing with a roof. And that was a sissy little F2...maybe a weak F3. Not anywhere near the power of the one that hit Oklahoma City a few years ago. In that storm, even a basement wouldn't have saved your life. A storm of similar magnitude ripped through a large ranch in South West Texas a couple of weeks after OK. It was a very large area with no population, so no one was injured. However, they found cattle...dead...completely stripped of their skin. That's some crazy *** power.

Ahh well, enough of my story telling. I've got a lifetime of weather stories. Oh, and I actually almost felt an earthquake once. It originated somewhere in New Mexico. Tremors were felt as far as West Texas. Unfortunately, it occured like at 2:00 am and no one was awake to feel it. Can you imagine the power of the one that hit the Mississippi river valley a couple of hundred years ago. Powerful enough to make the entire Mississippi river jump its banks and change course. And the river flowed backwards for weeks. Crazy stuff we live with. Maybe we all oughta move to the moon.

--nathan