message 6 of 10
by John » Tue Apr 30, 2024 04:49 pm
Sedalia really is a tornado magnet. The worst hit a few years before I moved here. Dad was at the Pizza Hut when the brick building next door was destroyed. He said there were bricks in the back of his truck, but the Pizza Hut was untouched. When I first moved here I lived out in the woods and was putting new shingles on my house when I looked toward Sedalia, about 20 minutes away. It was a beautiful sunny day where I was but I could see it was storming over Sedalia. Sure enough, it was another tornado that tore the roof off a factory and destroyed the local drive-in. A couple of years after I moved into my current house, maybe 8 or 10 years ago, a tornado wrecked a mobile home court southwest of me, tore part of the roof off a church a couple blocks from me, tore my front door open and tore my shutters off. It blew my garbage can away but blew in another, newer garbage can, and the yard was full of someone's canceled checks. I was away at work but Cheri was hiding in the closet. Another blew apart a house near town while the kids were hiding in the basement. Another touched down for just a few seconds and blew down some trees a few blocks north of me.
The closest I'd ever been though, was when I was a kid in Illinois. The storm woke up the whole family and we were watching out a back window when we saw a big wooden shed in the back yard lifted up, collapsed, then blown to the south. There was a light in the back yard so we could see it vividly. We'd have thought it was straight line winds but the next day we saw our pick-up camper next to the house, was blown off its blocks in the opposite direction. It was one of those big, fully furnished campers, and it crushed my brother's bicycle, while mine was laying next to it, untouched. I can enjoy a good storm if it's not too violent, but there's certainly nothing enjoyable about tornadoes. John