1) Hurricane Andrew - Maine 1992
2) Ice Storm '98 in Maine
3) Flood in South Carolina 2016
4) Crazy hail in Colorado 2018 (size of softballs)
5) Lightning that struck out neighbors house and knocked out all of our AC units in 2017
6) TORNADO 2019 in Dallas
Never thought I'd experience a tornado unless I lived in Oklahoma, but one touched down near the airport in Dallas two weeks ago. We had one other tornado warning while living here, and it amounted to nothing. People said that Dallas usually didn't get hit, but instead the flatter areas farther north saw more damage.
Nonetheless, our phones started buzzing with tornado warnings at 9 pm, so we checked the weather and sure enough, it was headed towards Richardson, estimated to arrive around 9:30 pm. We went out to bring in the furniture and toys in our yard. There was no rain, but an insane amount of lightning causing multiple flashes in the sky every second. We read updates about where the tornado was, and saw that it had moved across the highway towards our area.
The wind started picking up. Hyrum gave me a hard time for opening the back door so I could slam the screen door (it wasn't latched, and would have definitely broken off the hinge otherwise) because he says that's when the tornado was really close. We discussed whether we should go get the kids out of bed and take them into bathroom. But we really didn't want to wake them up.
[One note on wind: we had some craaazy wind in Colorado Springs, like 110 mph coming down the mountain and knocking over trees and powerlines. So strong winds weren't particularly shocking to me.]
We were trying to figure out how bad things were during the tornado, and saw that it was close. We unplugged all our electronics, got flashlights ready, and said a prayer. Then we no longer had internet, so it felt like we had no idea what was going on outside. We had heard sirens on and off since 9 pm, but never heard one loudly, so we kind of assumed we were fine. (In movies, don't loud sirens go off when there's danger??) Then I tried calling my mom to have her look up the tornado's path, but I had no cell service. I had to use Hyrum's phone, which for some reason still worked. While she was looking up the tornado's path the wind died down, and we figured it was all over.
So here's what we didn't know: the tornado hit super hard only a half mile from our house, and did a significant amount of damage in our neighborhood before continuing on another half mile and dying down. What???? Our first thought was, "Whoops! We probably should have woken the kids up."
I spent an hour on my phone trying to figure out what had happened. Our ward FB page was checking to see who was okay; people were posting pictures of their kids huddled in the bath tub. The neighborhood app had people saying their trees had fallen over, or that the BBQ grill blew into the pool. Meanwhile our light flickered on and off multiple times but always came back within 5 minutes. Once the adrenaline died down we went to bed.
Hyrum was up the next morning at 4 am to go to work, but when he got to the train station it was completely black without power, so he just drove all the way into Dallas. He said once he crossed over 635 (which circles the city) there wasn't much damage. There had been a detour near our house, with police blocking off part of a road.
The kids and I went out the next morning and saw a ton of leaves/debris/trash in our yard. Our front tree had a couple of small limbs dangling, but fortunately no real damage. (Although there were plenty of shingles, insulation, and a piece of siding in the yard.) It took a couple of hours to clean up, filling about 7 garbage bags. There were several neighbors outside doing the same, and walking around to see all the damage.
I had a grocery pick-up scheduled for 8 am so I loaded the kids up to go the half mile to Walmart. (The school district cancelled classes, as many schools and homes were without power.) We saw police at both ends of of neighborhood -- so I snuck out a side street. I could see trees down on the main road but they had already been cleared to the side. It took me about 10 minutes to figure out a way back into the neighborhood. Apparently the police were stationed there for the next two days to prevent service providers and onlookers from entering. We saw that a few streets south of us had severe damage-- enormous trees down in yards (a few on cars/houses), fences destroyed, car ports blown into the yard, etc. We walked around with a couple of other families in our neighborhood to help clean up trash and branches.
Here is a report that was later sent out detailing the tornado's path. It was an EF-3 in parts of Dallas and downgraded to EF- 1 in Richardson. (Our neighborhood is College Park.)
Another low-rise office building saw numerous windows blown out on all sides. The tornado continued into the Richland Park, Lakes of Buckingham, Richland Meadows, and College Park residential subdivisions where widespread tree and roof damage consistent with 80 to 95 mph winds occurred. A few homes in this area saw complete or total roof loss where winds were estimated at 110 mph or EF-1. The tornado began to weaken and took a sharp turn to the north near Richardson Square where it tracked to the Huffhines Park areas. Mostly tree damage occurred here with winds estimated near 70 mph or EF-0. The track then turned to the west and became very narrow near Duck Creek with the tornado dissipating as it crossed Jupiter Rd. The tornado had a continuous track for 32 minutes, tracked for just over 15 miles, produced maximum winds of 140 mph, with a maximum width of three-quarters of a mile.
One more thing to mention is that several neighbors also commented that they didn't hear a siren (which is supposed to sound from the local elementary school.) The city claims that all the sirens worked properly, but they're doing an investigation into that. Hearing that others also didn't hear a siren made me feel a little better about my lack of response.
Coming out of any disaster we can evaluate what went well, and what to prepare better for next time. My one resolution coming out of this was to join Twitter. I felt like there was not a great way to get up-to-date info on where the tornado was, but Twitter is great for that. I also need to be better about knowing local news channels. We felt quite uninformed.
The kids were back to school on Tuesday (thank goodness!) A few areas near Richland College (less than 2 miles from here) had whole houses destroyed. It's amazing to see how some houses were just gone, and next door it looked like nothing happened. The city was good about getting debris collected pretty quickly, but for the first few days there were enormous piles of branches lining sidewalks in our neighborhood.
And for the most part life (for us) is back to normal. Next time we'll wake the kids up!
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