CO tornadoes

[mattmcl]

We had half a dozen twisters touch down REALLY close to our house. One was reported about 8 miles NW, and a bunch just a bit NE of that. My wife said we had golf ball hail, and the wind was howling from all directions at once. She heard a loud roaring sound in the distance, but it could have been a train.

 

Kinda scary. They usually don't come this far west.

[Kheprera]

Can we get some sound-offs from the rest of the Colorado group? I'd like to know if I need to start crying yet.

[Doug Sundseth]

We got some hail here at work (not too far from Matt's house), but that was about the worst of it. I haven't heard of any particular problems yet in Denver and the suburbs. Most of the worst seems to have been farther north.

[Midnight Lurker]

Wow Matt! Sounds like you were pretty darn close to it if you could hear the classic train sound that twisters make. Awful glad that you guys are okay.

 

Greeley just got windy and we lost power for a few minutes. Not much more. It was kinda scary though. Reminded me of hudling in the basement with the sirens going off when I was a child.

 

I didn't realize it had hit this bad. They are saying it was an F3. Found a news link about the damage. http://www.9news.com/news/top-article.aspx?storyid=92268 Guess I was luckier than I knew!

[pae]

I think the reason that they came as far west as they did was because of the fact that they weren't moving west to east as they normally do. Coming up from the south to north really changed the dynamics, and so the storms had plenty of flat land to build up over.

 

For the record, everything down here was pretty quiet, with the exception for the winds. Come to think of it, 40-50 mph winds aren't unusual at all.

[anvil]

If we take a "chicken and the egg" approach, wouldn't trains sound like tornadoes?

 

Glad y'all are OK. We've recently started getting tornadoes here in north FL too, as if the hurricanes weren't enough. One touched down about 2 miles from my sisters *gulp* trailer last spring.

[Enchantra]

If we take a "chicken and the egg" approach, wouldn't trains sound like tornadoes?

 

*shivers*

I hate that train noise - heard it to much growing up in Southern Wisconsin. The summer of 1984 sticks out way to much in my mind, I swear every night the family was running for the basement. I remember Barneveld WI being leveled that year, and Black Earth WI which was MUCH closer to me being partly slammed by the same storm. That was the night the Tornado warning sirens didn't go off in our town because the sirens weren't on battery backup. You can imagine the firestorm that resulted from that.

 

We get Tornadoes here in NY, just not with the frequency. I think we had one confirmed tornado down in Naples (40 min south of me) last year. What we do tend to get here the local weather stations and governments are hesitant to call tornadoes. Why? Because if they call it a Tornado, then people's insurance won't cover it because most people here don't have Tornado insurance. So when we get one they tend to classify it as a "Microburst" instead which falls under storm damage on insurance claims. Dad has done one better. When he got insurance on the house he paid the few dollars extra (Like 10 for the year) to have Earthquake and Tornado insurance on our house. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

 

Ahh earthquakes - another thing we have a huge potential for here sitting on an active fault line but no one considers getting the insurance for it here and nothing is built to earthquake codes...Yeah we have the same potential for a 9.0 that California has, we just don't have the frequency California has. I shudder to think of what a 7.0 would do to this area, and much of NY since the fault line stretches down out of Canada, splinters and becomes the St. Lawrence, the Hudson River, and runs right down through the Fingerlakes region south into PA. NYC sits on the Hudson valley part of the fault line - if that doesn't scare you, nothing will. 13 million people....and no Earthquake construction codes...

[Midnight Lurker]

I just got home from work. The stories I am hearing are pretty intense. While I don't personally know anyone who suffered direct damage or injury, 9 out of 10 people at my store know someone who had a car totaled or lost part of their home. One of my co-workers still has not heard from his sister who lives right at ground zero, and he's pretty worried. Last night one of the news stations was saying that it was atleast an f3, but it looks more like an f4 to me. The photos of the damage zone… the witness accounts… it's overwhelming. Lots of folks houses and businesses are just *gone*, not destroyed mind you, but totally missing. Like Matt, it happened basicly down the street from me. I can't even imagine going through something like that. I want to try and volunteer or something, but it's still pretty hard just to get in there with all the roads closed down. And yet somehow Greeley was untouched. I just don't understand.

 

In whatever form you are comfortable with I ask for prayer for the victims. Like I said before I don't know anyone personally affected, but they are deeply on my heart.

 

Jen

[CuCulain42]

I saw one bilboard that was hit by a touchdown here on my way into work this morning.

[Maltique]

I hope everyone in CO was ok. We get them here in Kansas quite a bit. I've been around them all my life. Still a hard thing to explain until you have actually had one that close. I have been lucky enough to have never had one directly cross my path, but I have been within miles of them several times. I have had friends that had virtually no damage to their house, and their neighbor had nothing but clean swept foundation left. Strange how that works sometimes. Keep a look out friends, weather is a fickle foe.

[kristof65]

I think Matt, Velveteen and Midnight Lurker are the three closest to the areas of tornado.

 

My father in law was in his truck near the path at the time, but he's ok (his truck isn't, though).