Clouds, Lightning, Rain, Hail, Floods, and a Rainbow... Oh, and a Tornado

In terms of weather, this has been a very interesting week. I seemed to have outrun the Southwest's boring blue sky weather right around Oklahoma City, as I entered into this:


Seeing this cloud, I tuned the truck's stereo to the local weather. I had no problem finding a radio station that talked about the weather, because they were ALL playing the same thing--The Emergency Broadcast Alert. Apparently, this part of the country is prone to what experts call "tornadoes." In fact, the skies above the outskirts of OK City were very characteristic of those that create tornadoes.

The radio declared the counties just South of my Eastbound path of travel as under "tornado warning," and it was moving to the Northeast at about 15 to 20 miles per hour. I could have stopped where I was, let the storms progress a bit, and then continue in the morning, but being that I was in the middle of nowhere with no solid shelter, I decided to "put the hammer down" and scoot through to my terminal in OK City. Having been there a handful of times, I knew that the Swift terminal had a big strong building to take shelter in, should the worst happen.

I made it to the terminal with no incident, parked the rig, and started my evening paperwork. The air was weird at that moment--Full of moisture, blowing in several directions at once, and... something else--Maybe just a weird feeling.

Not too long after that, there was a knock at my truck's door. The staff at the Swift facility were making their way to all the trucks in the lot, warning us about the newly-updated tornado alerts, of which the county I was in was included. The radio instructed people in the county I was in to, "Take shelter immediately."

I grabbed all my irreplaceable items (computer, phone, wallet, etc.) and ran through a sudden hailstorm (see below) to the driver's lounge at the terminal, where there were 30 other drivers, a blaring TV, and two yipping dogs. Oddly, I couldn't smell the wet dogs over the scent of wet trucker.


I hate being in a confined space with other people (there are a few exceptions to this rule) so I went outside in the lightning to call Derek. A minute or two into our conversation I was scared by the nearby lightning enough to think that I shouldn't be in a parking lot on a phone in a lightning storm.

About an hour and a half went by, and a lot of the drivers decided that it'd probably be safe to walk back out to the trucks and go back to bed. When I got back to the truck, I laid in bed (fully clothed, shoes on) listening to the weather radio station. About 20 minutes later, it played the Emergency Broadcast Alert signal again (very much like the sound of when you accidentally call a fax machine), and again, I grabbed my "go bag" and hoofed it into the terminal. Being that I've never been near a tornado, I took the radio's advice to "take shelter immediately" quite literally.

Once in the driver's lounge, we watched TV for another hour before we decided that it was finally safe to go out to the trucks and sleep. Watching the news reports, we learned that a small twister touched down about 12 miles away from where we were. Listening to the radio the next morning, I heard a report that it caught a farmer by surprise; It came down on him, picked him up, and threw him 40 feet through the air into a grass field.

On the way back to my truck, I took these two pictures. They're the same picture (close, anyway), but one was taken during a lightning strike. You could swear it was daylight out:



I woke up that next morning still in my clothes, on top of the bed, with my go-bag next to me.

The following days were nearly as impressive, but not nearly as exciting. Mostly, I was impressed with the clouds. Back in Southern California, big, full, and well-defined clouds like I've been seeing are a rare event. The following two pictures were taken in Kentucky, one of my favorite states to drive through:


The day after the tornado scare I saw several rainbows, but only this one really came out in picture form:


Of course the local news, as well as the weather channels, have been reporting how over-saturated the area has become with water (in contrast to California's constant drought scares) from severe rains and storms. That's no joke, because I've been seeing the effects of the flooding on a daily basis. At first glance, the pictures below look like pictures of a lake. They're not. It's farmland.



This last picture is of a nuclear power plant in Northwestern Kentucky. I would say that even though many power plants have giant cooling towers like these, it's highly possible that this power plant was one that the creators of "The Simpsons" had in mind when they designed the power plant from the show. The series itself admits to being Kentucky-based, although this structure is nowhere near Springfield.