The sirens are blowing outside. I've gone to the basement of my workplace, St. Mary's Episcopal Church. It's a 153- year-old brick building in downtown Kansas City. We are having a wild day of storms here. One is directly overhead right now. For the last half hour the siren has wailed out its warning. We are all hypersensitive to the weather, with the deadly tornado earlier this week in Joplin.
Yesterday the weather experts warned that Kansas City could experience tornadoes today, developing from a eastward moving weather system that caused a deadly storm yesterday in Oklahoma. I watched today's weather develop from my second floor office window with a view to the south. The roof outside my office gives me a panoramic view of the city east and south. Minute-to-minute, block-by- block commentary from the new television in my office accompanied my real-world observations.
Last night I had spent some time considering where to go for shelter, should the weather turn bad during the workday. The church building has a basement. Most of it is barely below grade with lots of windows. All of it has thousands of pounds of bricks overhead.
The Joplin tornado was very unusual for many reasons and a lot has been written about it already. After reading those articles I know details about tornadoes, their genesis, structure and movement that I never knew before. I am no stranger to them. I've lived in a tornado-prone region for most of my life. My great grandfather, Joel Campbell Lyon, died a century ago when a tornado struck the log cabin where he lived in southern Indiana. I grew up in Hickman Mills, where a large and powerful tornado struck in May 1957. Although my family didn't move there until 1959 the tornado was a profound part of the culture of that neighborhood. When one of us meets someone else who grew up near there the first question asked is whether or not you witnessed the tornado.
When we moved to Kansas City from Des Moines, I didn't know what a tornado was. I became familiar with the routine of summer storms during my school years. A certain combination of heat and humidity, a hint from weather forecasters early in the day and the darkening sky in the afternoon or early evening prompted my mother to turn on the radio. The TV was already on, with local weather interrupting the program for brief updates. But the radio was battery operated and would keep us informed if the electric power went out. The wind grew stronger. Moms watched from the windows. Dads and some kids stood in their yards looking toward the southwest. When the rain and hail began the men stepped inside their opened garage doors and sent the kids inside. The open garages would provide ready access to the basement for neighbors running next door or across the street for shelter. Our houses were built frugally at the end of World War II and only a few of them had basements - ours didn't. When the sirens blew we headed across the street to the neighbors' basement. My mother would shout at us to put on our shoes, grab the radio and she and my father would push us out the front door and pull it shut behind them. The water table under the city of Joplin is very high. One of the reasons so many people died in the May 22 tornado is that very few homes there have shelter below ground.
I am thankful that all of our family's sojourns in the neighbors' basement ended with an all clear. The closest we came to danger was the tornado that struck Overland Park, Kansas in 1967. I heard my sister say "mom, it's a tornado" as she looked through the back door of our house. I ran out the front door and across the street without looking back. I think of friends and colleagues in the Joplin area whose lives have been changed in ways that I cannot imagine.
Today, I thought about those hasty trips to the basement as I made my way downstairs. My shoes were firmly on my feet although peep toes and kitten heels were probably not what my mother had in mind when she warned us to prepare for a possible walk over broken glass and debris. I realized that things had changed walking down two flights of stairs carrying a cell phone, laptop computer and the cordless handset of the church landline phone. As I sat on the basement floor, I exchanged a text message with my husband. My calls to him wouldn't go through - too many people trying to call. I posted a Facebook status along with a picture of the storm taken from the roof and retrieved a steady stream of comments from friends checking on each other. For all of our ability to communicate, we can't stop the wind blowing and the rain falling. Indeed, our heedlessness of the damage we cause to the enviornment likely has increased the violence of severe weather.
I see sunlight out the window. Time to gather the hardware and head upstairs. This storm is headed north and east. Others may be coming our way later today.
