yes, we are ok...

As many of you have heard, a tornado came VERY close to where we live Friday night. Most people have seen the damage at the Dome and Centennial Park. That area is about 1 mile from where we live.

At the time of the storm (9:40-ish) Mauri and I were at home watching Night at the Museum. I heard the weather radio go off a few times for some severe thunderstorm warnings west of town, but was hoping to avoid going in to cover for our 'idiot chief' for the second Friday in a row.

As the storm rolled by our place it was unbelievable how nasty it was. The rain, wind, and hail just whipped between our buildings and down the street. Once again as Mauri was looking for the cats to get to the bathroom I was headed to the door to see if I could see anything!

Seconds later my cell rang... it was work saying there are reports of severe damage at the dome and to get in. It seemed like 3 seconds later I was in my suit and on my way to work (with a full belly of sliders and beer, thanks Mauri!).

I was one air by 10 and continued to remain on air until 2am as several more damaging cells rolled over parts of the metro area. While I was not completely surprised by Friday night's storms, I was much more concerned on Friday about what we would see on Saturday.

We had yet another round of storms (not as strong as Friday night or Saturday afternoon's) around 6am. Luckily I did not have to go in for this. We handled it with crawls.

I was back to work by 11:30 Saturday morning as our last round of storms began to move in from Alabama. It was pretty much non-stop all day. Our station was at a disadvantage because we had NCAA basketball to worry about. The e-mails I got were pretty funny ripping me! Gotta love it.

Needless to say when you look at the pictures that were sent to CBS46 you can get an idea of the damage we got from the 3 rounds of storms.

In the end we had two fatalities on Saturday. The miraculous thing was that there were none near the Dome on Friday night. In the picture at the top of this entry you can see the path of the storm. It ended up being 6 miles long, 200 yards wide, and rated an EF-2 (5 is the highest) on the Enhanced Fujita Scale.

The tornado passed very close to my parent's business. I had a news crew check on it and they said it escaped damage.

One of the cooler things I saw was of construction webcams that are used to monitor the progress of buildings. There are two in particular that you should check out...

Go to this website

-Click on the one for The Atlantic
-Adjust the date back to Friday, March 14th
-Click on the 9:39 and 9:55 images and notice how the crane (red) of the building that is being built and will block our view completely spins around!!!




Next...

-Click on the one for Allen Plaza
-Adjust the date back to Friday, March 14th
-Click on the 9:33 and 9:57 images and notice how the lights go out and you can see where the hole is in the dome!



You can see more about the storm on my work blog entry I wrote at work about the storms.

Anyway, we are glad more people were not hurt. It was a crazy experience for sure. the good news is I have tons of material for my resume tape!

The job hunt is on!


--Chris