Amazing Train versus Tornado video (w/bonus personal nattering)

One day I was stupid. No, scratch that, I was REALLY stupid. It was Aug. 11, 1999, and I was living in Salt Lake City at the time. I worked downtown and on my lunch hour I used to go to the Borders Bookstore in Crossroads Mall (which I believe has been torn down now as part of the Mormon Church's attempt to make downtown Salt Lake City into a vapid wasteland similar to Scientology-haunted Clearwater, Florida).

On that day, I was reading a biography of Vera Nabokov (wife of Vladimir and a terribly interesting person in her own right). I remember hearing a BANG!** and so I wandered out to the entrance of the mall to see what was going on. The wind was really blowing hard, so hard that the metal sign poles were being bent back. Across the street, I could see one of the horse carriages (and horses) being pushed backwards with the force of the wind.

Instead of staying inside the mall, where I'd be better protected, I went out into the entrance and there I saw it. A tornado, crossing Temple Square, on its way to thrashing damage across the Avenues. I remember saying to the few other people who were gathered there, "Look, look, you can see the trash spiraling around." And you could. Then it was over, I went back inside, continued reading my book until it was time to get some lunch and go back to the office.

When I got back to the office, my coworkers were packing up to leave. Why? Well, because what I'd seen had been a tornado and downtown Salt Lake was basically being shut down. I ended up calling my mother to tell her I was OK, but, as luck would have it, she'd not turned on the TV and so had not seen the news about the tornado. I do remember my boyfriend being exceptionally jealous. "I've always wanted to see a tornado," he said. Well, yeah, I saw one, at probably less than 200 yards, but I had no idea what it was. If I had known it was a tornado, I would have probably run screaming for somewhere.

Which brings me to this video. It shows you how powerful tornadoes are and, above all, how QUICKLY the damage can occur.

Here's more information about this particular tornado from the NOAA. It was a rare January tornado in 2008.

And the lesson we take away from this, kiddies, is that tornadoes are not to be messed with. If a tornado heads your way, you need to get in the lowest spot possible (e.g., the tornado cellar or that water-filled ditch on the side of the road). I was told that if you are in a place without a cellar, going into the bathroom and getting into the bathtub (and if you could drag a mattress over you--good luck!) would be as good a protection as you could expect. Why, you might ask? Well, all the support for the plumbing and the pipes plus the tub and all that, you might actually survive.

Now I live in Arizona, where we don't have tornadoes but we do have violent microbursts. My dad's roof was taken off several years ago in a microburst and his skinflint insurance company would only pay to reroof the front side. Yanno, this is why people hate insurance companies. What good would reroofing only one half of the house do??

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**That BANG! was a transformer blowing up as the tornado crossed it. For more info about this tornado, here's Wikipedia.