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Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Tornado Outbreak

Yesterday there was a tornado outbreak here in North Texas. I saw on The Weather Channel that there were 14 confirmed tornadoes, with at least 3 of these major. One hit Arlington, severely damaging houses and also tearing through a truck yard (you can see the video of that, just go to weather.com). Another tornado went through Lancaster and damaged houses. The other tornado was in Kennedale and hit houses there. The damage was pretty severe everywhere, with houses crumbling and cars overturned. One house's top floor was completely sheared off, with only a little bit of debris left. Luckily, the worst of the storms went east of us so we only got a little of rain, thunder, and lightning. I looked at the radar and saw that the storms were kind of going near us and told Mom, who said we should keep an eye on it so we could go in the closet if we needed to. The storms got closer, and Mom said we should turn off the lights and go in her room just in case. Kannon was very scared, and I was a little scared too, but I did my best to remain calm so I didn't scare him more. The tornado sirens went off a little before it started raining, but they turned off after just a couple minutes. We stayed in Mom and Dad's room and watched the news. The middle three were pretty scared and went in the closet while Mom and I stayed out to watch the TV. We saw that the worst of the storms were going toward Dad, who was working in Plano. We were a little worried, so Mom called Dad to make sure he knew about the storms. Everyone was texting Mom to make sure we were okay, having been watching the news and seen the tornadoes. Mom texted them back to let them know we were okay. I saw the two worst storms were supercells with well-defined hook echoes, which are a hook-shaped appendage on a storm that usually indicates strong rotation and a possibility for tornadic development. We continued to monitor the storms and keep Dad informed. For a while, Plano was sandwiched in between the two storms until the one to the west started moving north-west. Fortunately, Plano didn't get hit very hard so Dad was fine. It was raining very hard there for a while, though. When the worst of the storms had passed, we came back out of Mom and Dad's room and waited for Dad to get home so he could take me to dance, because unfortunately Mom was sick and she couldn't take me. I ended up missing tap, but I made it to the rest of my classes.
Unfortunately, I didn't get any cool weather pictures. There were some cool mammatus clouds after everything was gone, but I was going to dance at the time so I couldn't take a picture. After dance, the whole sky was this brilliant yellow. I wish I could have gotten a picture of it, but I was way too tired to get one. I'm just glad I got to see it. I hope everyone was safe during the storms!

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