Follow the Yellow Brick Road......

Happy to report that myself and my family survived the storms yesterday!  One tornado touched ground less than a block behind my daughter's house.  Her husband picked her up from therapy early so they could get home before the storms hit.  Surprise!  They had no more gotten in the house when the sirens blew and the tornado was touching down on highway 9 behind their house.  This is it and what they saw when they got out of the car!

Then it traveled east toward Ron's place of employment.  He called me on his cell phone as the twister went by their building and it was LOUD even through the phone!  The ceiling tiles in the building were being lifted off their track and it took the door off the building so they had a lot of leaves and debris blowing in but other than that everything was OK.  It did destroy an out building on the property but they were all lucky.   This is Ron's account of the event as told to his daughter:


"There were Tornadoes to to Left of me! There were Tornadoes to the Right of Me! There were even Tornadoes on Top of ME!  But I did not make a visit to Oz!
 
At work there is a new building going up in front of where I work and all that had been completed was the "rib cage" of steel girders. Well, let's just say that the left side ( north side of the building) has some broken ribs now.
 
At work we were told to get into the class room as a tornado was on the way. It was! It touched down and hit that new buidling and went just to the north of my work building. As it went by, the building shook and the ceiling tiles were lifted up and down several times. Thought I was going to see the Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow or maybe the Rapture was coimg. Had two thoughts about the second option. If it was the rapture and I "disappeared" then that would be a good thing. If I "stayed" behind, then that may not be such a good thing.
 
About an hour later we repeated getting back into the class room as a another one was coming. But that warning was not as exciting(?) as the first one.
 
Finally, Sitel said to go home, so I did.
 
So in summary, I am still in Norman and not somewhere else."

Unfortunately there were a lot of people not so fortunate.  I believe today they said 5 people were confirmed dead and there may be more.  There were still some people missing.  I heard this morning on the news that there were 10  tornados in the entire state but a co-worker just told me that one station said there were more than 29 from the beginning to the end of the storm crossing the state.  I sure hope the storms lessened their intensity before traveling on east.  We are having a reprieve today but storms are expected for the remainder of the week.  Our tornado season didn't really get started here until yesterday.  We had been lucky so far this year.  Hope that's it for awhile!

 The Country Boy IGA on highway 9.