I am sure that when AR people began planning Rain Camp for Dallas this year, they didn't plan on Mother Nature's participation in making it rain. She sure did show up, just in time to give our out-of-state visitors a true measure of how much fun we can have out here in Texas making it rain.
I have spent most of my life living in North Texas. During that time, I have seen two major tornadic events. The first was the locally famous tornado of 1957 that ripped through parts of Oak Cliff and threatened downtown. http://www.1957dallastornado.net/ I was in grade school but I have very clear memories of the color of the sky. The sky that afternoon was very green, a green that was just wrong. What I know now is that the reason the sky goes green is because that is the color that light makes when it is refracted through hail. The more hail in the clouds, the greener it gets. In 1957, that sky was green, green, green.
Then, there was the tornado in downtown Ft Worth in 2000. http://www.fortwortharchitecture.com/tornado.htm I was having dinner two blocks from where the twister touched down, just north of the Amon Carter Museum. It started raining really hard just after I got to the restaurant. Then the storm sirens started going off and the power went out. The restaurant manager gathered up all the restaurant patrons and herded us into the kitchen. I stood at the back door of the kitchen with two of the waitstaff and listened to the characteristic "locomotive" sound made by the funnel cloud, the one and only time I ever heard THAT sound. Now that sound is the stuff of permanent memories. What I know about that locomotive sound is that it is made by all the debris picked up by funnel cloud. When tornadoes travel over open land they don't make that noise. That noise is all those 2x4s and double-wides banging into each other. Just thinking about that sound gives me goosebumps. By the time you can hear that sound, you are in real trouble.
Take a look at the hole in the middle of this picture. Want to guess what that is? I took that picture with my cell phone Tuesday night about 7:15, standing out in front of a house on Swiss Avenue, waiting for my client to arrive. And, no, I wasn't afraid. What good does it do to get scared? Being scared just uses up energy. There was lots of turbulence in that sky, but it wasn't time to really get worried. The client showed up, we looked at the house, and then I went home and had dinner.
I think it was about 10 p.m. by the time it was appropriate to begin really, really paying attention. I put the cat in the hallway, the closest place I have to a "safe room", along with my handbag, my cell phone and some candles. Then, as the storm cell passed over us, I moved back and forth between my living room where I could watch the radar on the Weather Channel and my patio where I could listen for that "locomotive" sound.
And, no, Tuesday night is NOT normal Texas weather.
