Res life just made us all come down to the first floor. Apparently there's a murderous tornado on the loose somewhere.

Murderous Tornado coming your way?
Earthquake shaking your apartment?
Tsunami crashing down on your village?

Time to log on RM

Pretty much. But it's pretty much the biggest overreaction ever. tornado warning expired 10 minutes ago, we're still here.

Have you read RM lately... no scratch that... Have you read RM ever?

I'm going to be the first RMer to post from an asteroid hurdling towards earth.

The general rule is to not shit your pants unless you hear them say "Tornado Emergency"

but by then it might be too late. i dont fuck around when they say tornado warning. i still remember jarrell texas. its like 30 miles from my house.

By not shit your pants, what I meant was, yeah, take it seriously, but don't panic. Stay rational and take the proper precautions, but most of the time you're going to be in the clear.

If you ever hear Tornado Emergency, though, you get your ass to the safest place you can think of as fast as humanly possible because the shit is going down.

agreed. when i hear the sound of a train coming, i dont live near train tracks, then i start shitting, sharting, farting, pissing, etc.

hopefully you heeded mother's advice and had an extra pair of clean underwear

Hey guys, I'm dead. The Tornado got me.

Man, when I first moved to Florida it seemed like we were getting a couple of Tornado warnings per week, had me really on edge. My wife was never really bothered by it though.

Then one day right before thanksgiving last year our Weather Radio woke us up with one, all the power went out and you heard the train sound outside. Even my wife was scared as shit that day. Some houses on the street had some minor damage, but that was about it in the end, thankfully.

Really, where do you live?

Raining like hell here

30 miles from Jarrell, Texas, dumbass.

actually just a wild guess. could be more. i remember driving by there last month going north on I35 and thinking to myself that it was a mile wide.

I live by the Arboretum.

Radius?

Aggies.

There's some kind of prankster or methhead who keeps calling in TORs every time an MCS rolls through your area. He's been a problem child for years. Basically the way to tell for sure whether you're in danger is if there's a weatherman on TV saying something other than "I'm not quite sure where the rotation is." We have one of those prankster types up here in Fort Dodge, IA, and there's one that calls the weather stations in Arkansas (and another in Kansas) overstating damage so they can get on air every time a weak tornado blows over an abandoned barn.

Tornado emergencies aren't actual classifications, by the way; they're an extra wording some local offices add to the warning texts, although the media seems to think that TE's are something different. My local office in Des Moines doesn't use the wording ("every warning is an emergency," even though our office is notorious for warning scud and ground-level outflow misreads and just about every hook or notch on the fucking radar) and didn't use "tornado emergency" when Parkersburg got hit with the EF5 two weeks ago. The words were used for the first time when Oklahoma City got whacked in 1999 with the Moore F5.

Basically, the words "large and destructive tornado" mean to get the fuck in the most secure place you can; in fact, if you're in a small town - say, 1,000 or less - and you have 15-20 minutes or so of warning for one of these large tornadoes, some are starting to say to evacuate the area in an orderly fashion. F5s (known as EF5s now) can suck you right out of a shelter, level all the interior rooms, or put a car into your basement. Fortunately, there has been only two of these since Moore.

Jarrell was the most fucked up storm in the "chasing era." Anyone from Ph.D. meteorologists on down to hobbyists still can't get a true handle over just what the fuck happened. It moved southwest, not necessarily unusual except that it was in the direct opposite way storm motions were that day; it ripped pavement up over any street it passed over; tore up foundations of homes (which is unheard of even for cheaper homes); and even sucked out plumbing pipes from the ground. There were two people on the outskirts of the path who escaped with critical injuries, but everyone else in the path of that storm died no matter how good their precautions were. A stormchaser in the area who expected only large hail that day said it was the worst tornado he's seen in thirty years of chasing, and he was on the Moore storm two years after that and has literally seen hundreds of the things and helped out at dozens of devastated cities. Pretty scary.