Saturday, June 13, 2009

Friday, June 12, 2009

Tornado in Flower Mound

Flower Mound Tornado Siren!


Flower Mound was hit by a tornado
Wednesday night! It is likely to be called a F-1 (F-5 being the strongest) It was worse than last year’s hail storm. I am still amazed at the power of TEXAS! Kenny and Nick were gone at high adventure so they missed out on all the fun.

Emma and I were at her dance dress rehearsal and when we had come into the auditorium we did not even expect rain it was so clear. We were there about an hour and they stopped the rehearsal and announced there was a tornado warning(worse than a tornado watch) and we were all to evacuate into the band hall. It was a little chaotic, but emma and I managed to walk by the concession stand and grab a couple of bags of M&M’s before making our way into the band hall. There was a lot of little dancers running around with their little tutus and hair slicked back in a bun playing duck, duck, goose, or other small games. Luckily because of my experience with dance recitals I did not put emma in her costume yet since her dance was toward the end of the show. She was not happy with me at first because her whole class had their costume on and she did not. Anyways about 20 minutes into we heard the thunder and than the lights went out and we sat in this band hall for another 40 minutes. Emma was very scared, and just wanted to get home to Lily!

That was my biggest fear was my kids at home and Ashley who was at Gymnastics.

I called Kelsi who was at home with Jackson and Lily and gave them instructions to go outside and get all the towels and pool stuff and make sure the closet under the stairs was cleared out so if they needed to they could get in. I told her when the sirens go off just go in the closet. She said Lily was very scared, and crying because the sirens are so loud and then our electricity went off for awhile and the house alarms were going off which are very loud.

I started texting Ashley and finally got one through. I told her not try to go home but wait until the storm had passed. She texted back they were all huddled in the pit but it was really scary and loud.

Finally the storm finished and we left quickly while it was still raining but I was desperate to get home. As we drove home there were a lot of trees down, but our house was fine, we had tons of branches all over our yard, our barbeque was blown over and broke and our table outside with umbrella ended up in the pool. But compared to everyone else we were very lucky.

Many people in our ward got hit hard, large trees spilt into two, chimney down, and lots with out electricity. The Priesthood was out making sure everyone was ok immediately after the storm making sure everyone was ok. They had crews out all day yesterday with their chainsaws cutting down trees. It was awesome to see.

The storm even affected Elder Mele who was returning from his mission in Brazil. We were going to try to go see him in the morning but because of the storm, Lily became sick and I just had a feeling it might not be a good thing for us to go. Then about 5:50 in the morning, the time we would have been driving to the airport to see Jake, another storm came with some powerful wind and rain! I was so glad we were at home. Poor Jake’s flight from Brazil was rerouted to Houston because of the second storm that hit right about the time he was suppose to land at DFW. He spent the most of the day in the airport, I’m sure just wanting to get home to his family! We thought at first he was stranded at DFW and so for awhile we got excited that he might be able to come and stay the night with us but no such luck! He made it home last night safely!

It has been a couple of crazy days in TEXAS!

I didn't think to take any pictures yesterday but someone sent me this a video of some storm chasers. They are driving down Morris Road just down the street from our house, (we live off of Morris) They pass the kids elementary school! (sorry about the language)

http://untamedscience.com/DFWstorm

http://www.scntx.com/articles/2009/06/10/breaking_news/96.txt