What Do You Do? – IOTW Report

What Do You Do?

Thursday, 23 March 2023, 0:45 BFH Uncategorized 34

34 Comments on What Do You Do?

  3. I actually road a F.0000001 out in SoCal when I was a kid. Damn thing could barely blow a fart out of your underwear. Them when we were kids pops got transferred back to Oconomowoc Wisco. There’s not a damn barn around there that some SOB wont swear was blown across the road one year and then set right back on the foundation the next. My aching head. That’s 360 degrees. That’s 21,600 minutes. I’m like twelve going, that’s highly improbable.

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  7. I drove through an F1 at night back around 1990. About a minute before it crossed my path, lightning from the storm blew up a transformer up the road from me.

    Fun,
    Times

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  18. Meh. I guess I would get the fam under cover and wait for it to pass, then go start digging my neighbors out.

    Just like always.

    …I grew up in the Midwest so my parents had us in a pretty conditioned response. Sirens go off, you head for the basement and get under a heavy table in the SW corner. The earlierst one I remember was the super outbreak of ’74, where the folks weren’t home and my then 16 yo brother was watching us and we were standing openmouthed on the back porch watching an F4 rip the community some miles to the East apart that (by the grace of God) didn’t track towards us. We then ran to the basement and stayed there till the panicky, harrassed folks got home, but happily didn’t get hit at the time.

    I got rudely knocked out of this conditioning when I was training to be a firefighter. I acquitted myself somewhat less than herioically on my first structure fire by a series of gaffes, my only excuse being I was still a Green Stripe proby and was there to learn better. I was late to the party because I drove my POV from my day job to the house, only to find it empty. I went ahead and changed into my turnouts and went to the parking lot with the intention of driving my car to the scene, only to discover as the house door swung shut behind me that I had left my keys in my jacket and could not go back in or get in my car. Happily (for me), the fire was actually visible from there, about a quarter mile away, and I was young, relatively healthy, and not especially bright then so I started hiking down the boulevard in a storm in full regalia, reporting to a somewhat bemused and distracted Incident Commander on my unexpected and not particularly helpful arrival. THe wind was whipping, the fire was blooming, and the roof was burning in the multi-unit dwelling, and because it was still pretty exciting and I was LITERALLY green, I was told to stand in the staging area while the REAL firefighters got things relatively under control. While doing so I heard an all-county broadcast concering the fact they had dropped a tornado warning, so I urgently ran to the IC and told him, only to be rebuffed with “So? The fire doesn’t care. Go back to staging!”. Properly chastized and having learned an elemental lesson about firefighting, I did so humbly. We were blessed that the tornado in question was in the opposite corner of the County from us as all our resources were already dedicated, but I learned we were EXPECTED to play in the rain, although I don’t know why I would have thought otherwise other than the atavasic fear response Mom had trained me to for all those years prior.

    Fortunately I was able to take the lesson to heart as it was just the beginning of years of driving around in storms, looking for victims, dealing with downed wires, flaming gas lines, flipped vehicles, damaged buildings, and partly collapsed occupied structures on fire. If the tornado took us, it took us, unless the firehouse was physically blocked or the equipment damaged we ran regardless. Fortune favored the foolish during my time though, and a doubtlessly amused Lord let us get away with it.

    Fast forward a few years after I had parted service and got a real job, and this conditioning almost got me killed.

    …one morning in 1999, I was getting ready to go to work, usual day, usual way, although the rain was rather agressive and everyone was already up because my very pregnant wife had us down in the basement because of storm warnings. As I had previously said I was rather impatient with this having had a healthy fear response trained out of me as well as being rather earnest about making money with a baby on the way, but she was quite jumpy and hormonal so sure, I’ll cower in the basement with her and the MIL until this storm passes and be late to work and stuff, and I think I even made fun of her the whole time. Well, eventually the weatherman quit saying “We’re Under The Gun”, so she reluctantly let my impatient butt go on to work, which happened to be in the direction of the worst of the storm.

    As I got closer I started seeing interesting things. Downed wires of course and blacked-out intersections, then semis turned on their sides (I checked, they were unoccupied when I got there), and a couple blocks to the Southwest of my destination the very visible even in the dark damage a gas station that had been heavily damaged, giant steel awning knocked over and windows gone, pumps uprooted, and the cars around it given a toss. The blacked-out road was still clear of larger debris though and the FD was there, so I went on and by some miracle my employer was not only undamaged but still had power, so I shook my head and went to work.

    Later, I found out that the tornado had hit the gas station as a probable F3, lifted up OVER my employer, and dropped down about 2 miles away to the NE as an F5, completely ripping an entire neighborhood to matchsticks, killing people in their beds, and even sucking a guy in his pickup truck on the nearby Interstate to his death.

    Had I left as scheduled, I would have been in that area during the F3 phase of it in my car. Not a great place to be.

    The lesson there was that putting fear aside needs to be leavened with common sense. Getting to work wasn’t worth dying en-route, I wouldn’t even get paid for the day if I didn’t make it to the time clock.

    And also that one should not doubt a woman’s intuition. I think God gives ladies an extra measure of common sense to protect their family and try to keep dumbass males like me from crossing the line between bravery and stupidity. But even before then, I had my limits as far as that line went.

    Which was that I would not go out in a storm for the sole purpose of taking a picture of it, as Brown Eyed Girl notes that was done here above. In any risk/benefit analysis, it ain’t worth it. This wasn’t a huge risk in my day as you had to find a film camera that had film in it and jigger with fstops and exposure times and suchand having a Super 8 movie camera at the ready was simply not a thing, but the sail phonnes these days have made it easy for everyone to cross over into stupidity, like they won’t get hurt as long as they are holding a phone between them and the danger. Weirdly, they’ve also disconnected people from the danger RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM as you’ll notice when folks take their cell phones to a fire, an explosion, a fight, a beating, a rape, a shooting, and don’t do anything about what’s going on with what they’re taking a video of even if a life is in danger so they can get YouTube clicks.

    If I could erase any one invention from humans, the cell phone would probably be it.

    It’s made people more connected so they don’t have time to cool off before saying something stupid that they will regret, while simulataneously removing the humanity from them when trying to capture a tragedy and possibly monetize it, and also allows for selective editing of things to produce the worst possible result.

    I think at the end of the day, I’d rather deal with the tornado than the person filming it.

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  22. If I’m that close, I was chasing it to start with – I would have left myself a path southward (preferable) or eastward to escape it. Caught an F3 near Bridgeport NE in ’96 that wanted to eat me, but I escaped behind it going nw of all things. I was south of it already when it became a right turner.

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  27. LocoBlancoSaltine March 23, 2023 at 12:52 am

    Since we are doing videos, here is a good one from Ozzyman and it’s NOT political.
    The dude is priceless…

    ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9mtM0uIQ9Q
    ———————

    OMG! That was hilarious! Not too sure about the driver, he looked pissed off the whole time. Thanks for the laugh!

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