Texas Tornado

[kristie here]

Having never experienced a tornado, I wasn't phased all that much by the tornado warning siren Thursday night or the non-stop news coverage of the storm. It even seemed silly to me that I had to cram into a stuffy hallway in the basement of Norton Hall with countless other women while we waited for clearance to begin classes that would be cancelled 15 minutes later.

I thought it was a bit extreme...kind of like the stereotypical southern high school that cancels school when it begins to flurry. That was, of course, until we flipped on the news and a reporter was covering the spot where the tornado had touched down. We soon realized she was standing outside the Kroger grocery store just a mile or two down the road from our apartment! What?!

Then this morning while I was walking with a friend before work, we came across this site:

In case you can't tell, that's the whole side of a gas station overhead that was mutilated by the storm last night. The crazy thing is that gas station is less than 75 yards from our apartment!

So apparently tornadoes don't just happen in the wide open plains of Texas like I thought. Next time I think this Yankee will take the warnings a bit more seriously.