We have had a few days in a row where the weather looks dicey as it begins to form over the Twin Cities. Reports of flooding, high winds, hail, funnel clouds and even tornadoes have come in from the National Weather Service. These weather patterns have just popped up and stalled over the Twin Cities dumping rain for hours before moving on east.
No. I’m not a meteorologist. I would consider myself a weather enthusiast. Especially when it comes to weather “events” like storms or hail or blizzards. Mostly anything whirly and tornadic, though.
It all started when I was very young. We were living in a suburb of
Minneapolis and we had a big orange couch in front of the picture window in the living room. I liked to stand on the couch and look outside at the busy street and my mom’s big garden. One day, I told my mom to come and look outside and showed her a tornado in the sky. Since the rest of the sky was sunny, she told me that it was not a tornado. Any mom would have said the same thing. She went back to the dining room table where she was having coffee with her friends who had come to pick their kids up from our in-home daycare.
A few minutes later the sky turned green and a storm whipped up. I remember the radio screaming that anyone in the path of this storm should seek shelter in a basement immediately. That the storm was unexpected and had spawned a tornado.
I’m not sure if I actually saw a tornado that day or not. More likely maybe a funnel cloud. But I saw either saw something or it was the biggest freak coincidence in history.
This, I might add, is back in the day when the only time you were asked to seek shelter was during a real weather threat. Usually a tornado that had touched down or at the very least a funnel cloud that had begun to sneak ever so close to the ground. I remember dad outside standing on the picnic table searching the green skies for whirls and twirls and funnel clouds.
Since that day I showed mom a tornado in the clouds, I have been a weather watcher. Ok, my sister and my close friends would call it more of a major fear, but I consider it more of an interest.
But I am disappointed in the weather reporting of today, when sirens sound whenever a dark cloud appears. And people are urged to seek shelter at the first crack of thunder. Now, before you get yourselves all worked up thinking that I would like to see children doing rain dances in a lightening storm, I just want to ask you: what happened to common sense? To assessing a situation and determining what action to take based on your knowledge of weather events? To actually letting your kids dance in a lighteningless summer shower? Or puddle jump after the rain?
When I first moved here our city sounded the sirens whenever there was a severe storm in the county. This is one of the bigger counties in the state, so I definitely heard sirens go off whe there wasn’t even any rain or clouds in the sky. At least that has been revised.
But, have we become so dumb and dependent that we need the media to tell us that it is not safe to play out in a storm? I absolutely, fundamentally disagree with sounding tornado sirens for anything but a tornado or well-formed funnel cloud directly in the path of the city involved. Constant sounding of those sirens is like crying wolf and one day a tornado will strike without warning and people may lose their lives as they cast it off as an impending severe storm deciding to wait it out watching out the picture window, standing backwards on the big orange couch.
(Check out this link from You Tube for footage of the tornado. It was one of the first ever caught on tape from a traffic helicopter.
July 1986 tornado Brooklyn Park, MN )
Really interesting! Loved reading the story in the beginning and I agree with your point at the end.