Massive Tornado System Came Through Our Region Yesterday~

Just a very quick note to share that we are all fine here, and oh so thankful! 

We live 9 miles from the Ohio River as a bird flies and Indiana.  

They really got hit very hard!  

Some of the many tornadoes spawned in this system were said to have been a 1/2 mile wide.  In our larger city of Louisville there was golfball to baseball sized hail.  

I walked my 2 miles in sunshine and then all of a sudden the sky began to churn and the severe storms lasted for hours off and on.  

Our weather forecasters saw this system coming on Wednesday and they all did a fine job of alerting us.  

We have a phone alert system which alerts us when a tornado watch has become a warning in our county and we got 2 warning alert calls yesterday and 2 in January, and it is one of the most frightening times that we live with here.

Tornadoes can come any time, yet in all of my years of living here, I do not ever recall having winter tornadoes.  The alerts usually come from mid-March through June, at least in our region.  

Oh for a massive snow storm, even another ice storm, but these kinds of storms...are really so frightening and it always makes you appreciate that we have absolutely no control whatsoever over nature! 

In 1974, our area was hit by a massive tornado that has not until yesterday been hit by such an extreme day for spawning many more tornadoes in the system. I have heard that the first massive tornado yesterday was rare in that it pretty much stayed to the ground for over 45 minutes!  An entire Middle school-high school was totaled in less than 30 seconds.  The death toll is rising as they continue to search the hardest hit areas...just so heart breaking.  My nephew went past one of the worst hit areas in route to Chicago this morning and he said the news clips do not show it to be anything as awful as seeing it in real life.    

I am so very, very, thankful and yet my heart aches, truly aches for the huge losses that so many now face.  

Remembering them now, and the days and weeks that lie ahead for them!

  

Thank you again~  

Mary