Posts categorized “Tornadoes”.

Stephen Fry, the lovable rapscallion often thought of alongside cohorts Hugh Laurie and/or Rowan Atkinson, has been in Louisiana for a few days doing various bits about life in the N’Orleans area for a project of his. Well, life got very interesting for Mr. Fry very quickly on Sunday afternoon, and because he is such an aficionado of Twitter, we got to see the excitement first-hand.

The day started off pleasantly enough:

But at 2:39 in the afternoon he tweeted a rather more ominous message:

He tweeted again in the next few minutes (titling them simply “Uh-oh” and “Snaking its way down…”). Each tweet was accompanied by a photograph showing the progress of the tornado:

Then Mr. Fry’s tweeting ceased. This caused a bit of a sit in the Twitterverse—had he been swallowed up by the meteorological menace? Eventually, just over a half-hour later, Mr. Fry returned to reassure everyone:

Whew! And here we have another example of what a wondrous future we live in, wherein a man armed only with an iPhone and a Twitter account can give an immediate account of astounding weather phenomena. We don’t have to rely on the hope that someone caught some footage of it that might make it to the local news that evening, which might then possibly be picked up by a national news (or perhaps end up as footage in Mr. Fry’s Louisiana project a while down the road). Instead the connection is instant between the witness and the audience, without need for any pesky middle-men sticking their thumbs in it.

It also helps that I just so happen to have an incredible fascination with tornadoes.

So turns out there was actually a tornado that touched down in largely-uninhabited Enumclaw on Sunday. It knocked over some trees and fences and an old barn, and it “dropped a shed on top of a tractor.” Here’s a video that someone shot of it. It’s kinda hard to see because of contrast:

This is the first confirmed tornado in Western Washington since the one back in January 2008 near Vancouver. Learn more about this one!

I had a tornado dream a couple of nights ago! Hooray! I so heart my tornado dreams. This one was unusual in that very early on I realized it was a dream. You’ll see why:

My brother & I were looking out the back of the house we grew up in (in Kent). The sky was clouded with a pretty uniform light gray, but in the center of the sky a big swirl was starting to form. We were very excited about this, because tornadoes come from swirly clouds.

But there was something almost immediately odd about the swirl in the clouds. It was too regular. Too… fractal. Like this:

I was immediately suspicious, and told my brother, “I think this might be a dream.” But almost immediately an actual funnel cloud formed and dove for the ground. It wasn’t so much a funnel cloud, though, as it was a wiggly vertical tube cloud that descended from the spiral.

We were very pleased by this development; it seemed realistic enough. We eagerly watched as the bottom of the tube approached the ground.

But then *BOINK* the instant the tornado touched down it was, as if by magic, replaced with a gigantic orange tarp. Several hundred feet tall, awkwardly rolled up and bound by many ropes.

“Yeah,” I said to my brother, “this is a dream all right.”

My dream people valiantly tried to keep the dream going after that, which included us storm-chasing in a car a very tiny tornado (about 12″ wide) that was headed for Seattle, while simultaneously being “chased” (it was more just lazily following us) by an identical tornado. When we got to Seattle I think my dream people didn’t feel like accurately rendering the city, because it didn’t look at all like the real Seattle.

But what were they thinking? A tornado transforms into an enormous orange tarp? What the heck kind of dream is that?

Soon after that I switched to another dream entirely that was a post-apocalyptic story about an afterlife in which everybody got indestructible bodies that were exact copies of their real ones, but then had to live among the ruins on Earth. Also, there was an angel who was in charge of all of this who was kind of awkward and didn’t know how to comfort all of the horribly upset, recently-deceased people.

A few nights ago I had a tornado dream! Hooray! I ♥ (heart) tornado dreams.

There were a bunch of small, duplex-like white buildings to my right (east), and a broad sidewalk ran parallel to them. Off to the left (west) was a large, flat, grassy plain that continued on to the west for a few miles, eventually meeting up with some low mountains. All of these features (buildings included) continued north and south as far as I could tell.

Several people I know (including me) were walking south along this broad sidewalk. It was rather crowded, with various unknown people walking in both directions. The sky was an intimidating gray. I happened to look off to my left and said, “Oh, hey, look; that looks like about an F-4 to me.”

Indeed, a quarter-mile-wide tornado was silently plowing its way south through the plains to the west. Nobody seemed very concerned, though—there was nothing over there it could actually damage, and it wasn’t heading in our direction, just going steadily south at barely more than walking speed. So we all just kinda watched it like you’d watch a pretty sunset as we continued walking on.

Eventually the fact that I’ve been playing a lot of Super Mario Galaxy became apparent: a bunch of tiny (18″ wide), blue, rope-like tornadoes began to appear on the sidewalk and slowly move back and forth across the width of it so that all of the people had to maneuver their way around them.

After we got past a couple of them I guess my dream people ran out of ideas for the dream, because that’s pretty much all that happened.

The last week has been kind of a crazy week for weather here in the Pacific Northwest. Everywhere, that is, except for Tacoma.

It started last Thursday when an actual tornado struck Vancouver, WA.

Then Sunday and Monday were particularly beautiful days (apart from some morning fog). Sunny and warm on Sunday, sunny and cold on Monday.

Monday evening I finished watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles and the Q13 News at 10:00 came on with a big story about the huge winter storm that was slamming the Northwest.

“What!?” I exclaimed out loud. I rushed to the window. Completely clear. The TV was showing footage of cars struggling to drive in snow flurries and on snow-coated roads in Seattle. I let Suki out to potty in the backyard and discovered a beautiful, crystal evening with a clear, black sky and bright stars. The trees weren’t disturbed the the slightest wind.

Meanwhile in Puyallup a tree got blown over in a windstorm and smashed a garage.

This morning all the news reports were of snow, ice, and dangerous roads. Here in Tacoma it’s a beautiful, sunny day again. A little bit of ice on the ground, but not on any of the main roads at all.

It seems often that Tacoma is an anti-convergence zone. We tend to get the opposite weather that the rest of the Northwest is getting.

Very strange.

Last night I had an absolutely incredible Tornado dream. It was a really good one, and it was especially good because it never strayed into abject fantasy like so many of my other ones did. And this one actually had a sense of urgency and menace! Too often my tornado dreams aren’t scary.

In this one I was at a party with about 100 guests at this really big house. I know that Carrie was there, and my Dad and Susan and I’m pretty sure all of Fools Play and most of its regular audience. The house seemed to be located somewhere in the Kent/Auburn valley (where a surprising number of my tornado dreams take place). There was a lot of empty land around it, except to the south was a chain-link-fenced in area that had really tall grass and a lot of junked machinery in it. To get to the house you had to drive over a wide wooden bridge that spanned a shallow dry riverbed. All the roads in view were just dirt, but wide enough to be two lanes.

For some reason at one point I left the party (I think maybe someone had pissed me off and I needed to cool down, but I don’t remember that part–just a feeling I have) and walked down the road, over the bridge, and turned left towards the parking lot (gravel & dirt, no lines) of the junk place. As I was walking over the bridge I noted to myself at how menacing the sky to my right looked. The clouds were really low and moving pretty fast, and they were the same dirty brown as the roads.

I’m not sure if I called him or if he spontaneously came to get me (or someone told him to), but my dad drove out to the parking lot where I was and picked me up in his old 1989 Taurus. As we were driving back we looked to the left and we could actually see the tornado starting to form very nearyby in the dry riverbed. I urged my dad to go a little faster over the bridge. When we got back to the party house it was completely empty. There was nobody on the back porch, either. And the tornado looked like it was heading straight towards the house. Well, shit!

We finally found that if you went out on the back porch and turned left around the house there was a door that opened onto a staircase that led down to a massive, windowless cellar beneath the house. But all 100 guests could in no way fit in the cellar, so they were crowding the steps all the way back to the door. Carrie had saved me a place about ten feet down the stairs (the stairs were really long, and curved to the left), but the stairs themselves looked really rickety and I didn’t want to be standing on them if the tornado hit. So I moved us over to the wall so we could stand on the actual wall instead of the stairs. That way in case they collapsed we wouldn’t fall.

At this point the dream gets muddled, and I think I woke up once or twice, but basically the tornado passed by the house with no damage. Sometime around this time my dream people tried to invent another, gigantic tornado way off to the north, but that was thankfully soon dropped.

The next day I went down into the dry riverbed and you could see the circular scar on the ground from where the tornado first touched down. It was about seven feet wide, and after a couple of bounces it turned into a solid scar about three feet wide that went straight down the middle of the riverbed. I followed it as far as I could, until I got to the chain-link fence. I could see where the tornado had parted the tall grass inside.

It was really, really cool.

I hope I never have to experience a tornado in real life, but for some reason one happens in or near Tacoma every couple of years (most recently a funnel cloud formed and threatened a tornado, but it never developed).