Yesterday, I was out of town in business, in Muscatine, IA. If you paid close attention to the national news programs last night, or happen to be a weather junkie, you probably saw some coverage of the tornado that went through that area.
I was LITERALLY right at groundzero when it hit..............outside in my vehicle. I'm very fortunate to even be alive.
I had just checked into the Holiday Inn, and was preparing to meet someone to go out to lunch. I knew it was storming out, and there was a tornado warning, but it wasn't too bad out where I was. Living in the Midwest my entire life, I didn't think too much about it, warnings and watches are a regular occurence all summer long.
I went out in my company SUV to wait for the guy I was meeting. Within about 3-4 minutes of going outside, I saw off in the Southeast a funnel cloud drop. This is the second time in about a month I've seen one firsthand.
These pictures are the best I could get with my cameraphone, taken from the Holiday Inn parking lot.
After maybe 45 seconds or so, the funnel cloud lifted. As you can probably tell from those pictures, there was not much rain or wind where I was at during that time. However, I know that one of my customers lives that direction. I thought it was too far away to be near her house, but I also knew that she had left work early that day and would've been home. So I immediately called her to make sure that everything was ok.
She had heard sirens go off, but didn't realize a tornado had actually touched down. I was on the phone with her, when, in a matter of less than 10-15 seconds, everything went insane.
You can see the car dealership across the street in the pictures......I started seeing all kinds of debris swirling around in the parking lot there. I saw BIG, BIG chunks of metal, poles, signs, and sheeting start FLYING through the air at probably 50+mph. The wind went from almost nothing, to being so intense it was rocking my SUV so hard that I was afraid it would be literally lifted off the ground and thrown who knows where, all within probably 5 seconds. So, as I'm watching swirling winds and debris heading for me, I gun the vehicle across the parking lot heading for the carport and relative shelter.
At the same time I am talking to her, all of sudden I hear what sounds like a very severe hailstorm slamming into the vehicle...........but it's not hail, it's debris flying through the air. I make it about 2/3rds the way to the carport, the vehicle rocking still like it's going to be tipped over, when I hear a sharp crack, and the driver's side window implodes all over me. I didn't realize it at the time, but the rearmost window on my side also had a large hole blasted in it.
The SUV also has scattered dings and dents covering the entire driver's side. The last picture is where something very solid must've hit the pillar on the rear-driver's side corner, it left a sizable dent, and spiderwebbed the paint pretty good.
Here are pictures of the shattered out windows, and the worst dent. It's not terribly clear in the picture, but there are actually gauges in the dash from debris and glass being embedded in it after the window broke.
And all of this damage happened WHILE your's truly was in the driver's seat. I never made it to the carport until after it swept through. The entire time I was still talking to her on the phone too.
To give you a breakdown of just how much I was actually in the very middle of some of the worst of it, here is a map of the area.
The green area is the Holiday Inn, whose parking lot I was in.
The lowest red mark to the left, is a McDonald's who had half of it's roof sheeting ripped off. There is also a picture of some of the shattered glass in the play area.
Moving towards the hotel, directly across the street from it is the car dealership you can see in the first pictures. Where that red mark is, a Ford Taurus was literally picked up and set on top of a Mustang.
The trees you see in the last couple of pictures are snapped off and knocked down right on the edge of the hotel parking lot. I was racing right next to those trees at the same time my windows shattered.
Now, on the largest red mark, to the upper right, is a Walmart. Here are pictures of what happened in that parking lot around the same time my windows were shattering. The trees you see behind the trucks? Those are part of the same lot of trees you saw in my picture. I was probably 200-300 yards behind those trucks when they were turned over.
Talk about a freaky experience.
Here is a link to view some other pictures from the town, from the tornado last night.
http://www.muscatinejournal.com/mult...slideshow&id=4
