Webb City is a bit over an hour north of us. It is also 4 miles north Of Joplin, which had their 8 year anniversary of the F5 that killed over 150 people 8 years ago.

It was getting busy all around us last night!

Dammit, why does Missouri have all the luck....

Angel took the cats into the basement last night. She's at her grandmother's house in Warsaw, 1.5 hours SW of Jeff City. The band that hit Jeff passed over her area. Sirens were going off and she said she hadn't seen the sky that green for a long time. The Jeff city hit is the worst part of the storm. You think it's over and you can come out and go to bed. Then one flares up and takes out your house.

I was listening to the scanner, and dispatch was notifying their units that another band was coming in...

I can only imagine it's like a war zone.... bombers come through, you go and try to search the rubble for survivors and next thing you know you got another fleet of bombers headed your way....

I raffed.

Spent a lot of time as a child in Cape Girardeau, MO, down in the Bootheel, with my Grammie. She'd married an American who had flown for the RCAF during WWII.

Anyway. Tornadoes are absolutely random as absolute (swear word). I remember going down the Kingshighway after one, and on one side of the road, billboards were twisted, so that they looked like screws. The other side of the road? Not a damn thing was disturbed. Another summer, a tornado, or cluster of tornadoes, ripped through, leaving I think three people dead. The neighbour's house had the roof ripped completely off--just gone--but not a piece of furniture was out of place.

We were always lucky, and our neighbourhood was usually unscathed, but those hours sitting in the basement, listening to the radio weather reports...something else. And Grammie was the OG prepper--she could've lived for weeks, if not months, on what she had stored in the tornado cellar. She specifically kept her RN licence current until two years before her death in 2009, just so that she could assist in the aftermath of tornadoes--and she did, dragging me along to St. Francis and SEMO University hospitals to attend to the injured as needed (she only gave up the licence after cataract surgery left her unable to confidently place an IV).

So yah, reading the news today is rough.