Tornado!

Before you get to far in reading this blog posting, I would like to warn you that if you want a lot of information about the tornadoes that hit the metro area yesterday, you will be very disappointed as I didn't witness any of them. Instead, I will just tell you of what I experienced during the storm yesterday.

As I was working from my home office yesterday afternoon, I heard the weather alert radio go off downstairs. I ran to the radio to hear it inform me that the neighboring county to mine had a tornado warning, but at that time there was no warning for Washington County, so I turned on the TV to see what was happening and went back to work. A short time later, I heard sirens going off nearby, but no alerts for my area had come through on the weather radio yet. So after looking outside and seeing that it just was raining and slightly windy, I went back to work. About ten minutes later the weather radio finally sounded indicating that there was a tornado warning for southern Washington County. I stepped out the front door, and it looked perfectly calm, but the meteorologists on TV seemed to indicate that tornadoes could pop up unexpectedly, so I decided to take cover downstairs for the duration of the warning.

Apparently there was a tornado which hit the southern part of Cottage Grove, doing some minor damage, but it was nowhere near our house. It looks like we were spared most of the damage that occurred from the tornado which hit Minneapolis. Nevertheless, I am guessing that we will still have people coming by the house asking if they can give us an estimate on repairing the "storm damage" to our roof. Over the past year, that is a regular occurrence after any time there seems to be a strong wind.

Now if you want to see some storm related videos, I have found a couple for your enjoyment.

The first is a video of the tornado in Minneapolis shot by a meteorologist from Pennsylvania who was in town visiting his daughter.

This second video is of people driving through flooded streets.