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Dressing up for a Tornado
Wed Oct 27, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Dressing up for a tornado, next on The Weather Notebook.
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for the Weather Notebook. What’s do you wear to a tornado? There’s usually not much time to decide, as commentator Bill Clough discovered over four decades ago.
A Sunday evening in Amarillo, Texas--summer of 1963: A line of thunderstorms had just passed, leaving the sky pitch black except for a thin line of sunset orange along the horizon.
My mother, who always dressed well, was scheduled for surgery the next day. Because the hospital was short on beds, she was at home, sedated on morphine.
About a mile away, a funnel touched the ground, raising dust in that familiar wedge shape. A civil defense siren went off.
“I’ll get the dog,” my father ordered. “You get mother dressed. We’ll shelter under the overpass.” Our logic was simple: our frame house, or the concrete and steel of that overpass.
I went to the bedroom and shook my mother awake. “There’s a tornado coming. You’ve got to get dressed.”
She opened her eyes wide…got out of bed…went to the closet…turned on the light. Things seemed well in hand; I left to help with the dog.
“Where’s mother?” my father asked. I went back into the bedroom. Mother had gone back to sleep.
“MOTHER!” I yelled. THERE’S A TORNADO COMING. YOU’VE GOT TO GET DRESSED!”
“Yes, I know,” she said, snuggling down in the bed. “But, I’ve never been to a tornado. I couldn’t decide what to wear.”
The funnel went back into the clouds. Mother’s surgery was successful. We teased her about it for the rest of her days.
Bill Clough is the News Director at South Texas Public Radio and he reminds us that The National Weather Service does not recommend hiding under an overpass during a tornado. The Weather Notebook is a program of the Mount Washington Observatory, funded by Subaru of America.
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