Tornado!
Even if you rarely read people's entries and never read long ones, you want to read this. Trust me.
Today after German instead of going to work I grabbed my guitar and walked to the Ped Mall. I met a guy named Nathan from Minneapolis who had a guitar, and got to talking with him and after a while we started jamming together. The music he played seemed to be a lot like the music I play, and I really felt like I could jam well with him. I've never felt quite like that when playing with someone, that we both wanted exactly the same out of the music. Anyway, it was a beautiful day, but I had to get to my Interpretation of Lit class at EPB (English and Philosophy Building, for non UI folks).
It was so nice that we held the first half of class outside, until it started raining. Then, around 8:10, we heard tornado sirens and managed to convince our teacher to move down to the basement hallway from our second-floor classroom. She was pretty sure nothing was going to happen, but gave in. On our way down, we looked out the doors and saw hail the size of ping-pong balls. It was pretty weird. We finished the last twenty minutes of class in the basement, and then she told us all to go home and be safe. I walked over to the east entrance of the building and opened the door. The tornado sirens seemed somehow more insistent than usual and the sky didn't seem right. A guy came out of the building behind me with his laptop, telling me about some movie he had been watching and something he was writing, and then he started asking me about how it was living in the "end times". We looked at the sky, and the clouds were all moving so fast.
All of a sudden that didn't matter though: I heard a huge WHOOSH sound coming from every direction, and in the south, over by Riverside Drive, I saw the tornado. It was the classic train noise, and it looked really big and white, just like a huge triange splitting the sky in two. I really didn't like it and was getting pretty scared, so I went back in the building and told the people from my class who were still there that I thought I had just seen a tornado. My teacher asked to borrow my cell phone, and then John Pienta and I went to look out the south door. There were some janitor-type people there, and we listened and heard the roaring noise some more, this time coming from more of an easterly direction, over by Burlington Street and the Lindquist Center. After a bit it just stopped, and the janitors were offering us popcorn and saying that they thought the roaring noise had just been the forced-air system (which I know from having to dig through hundreds of blueprints is jargon for the ventilation part of HVAC, which itself is jargon for Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning).
It wasn't the forced air system, it was a tornado going through downtown Iowa City.
I waited for a while more in the basement of EPB, then decided I needed to get back to Daum. I went back outside and the sirens weren't going, but when I had gotten just as far as Adler, they blared up again and I freaked out and went in there for a few minutes. Eventually I remembered the sirens go on and off and decided to head out again. That trek from EPB to Daum seemed so inconceivably long. I saw three cars on the street the whole time, and two of them were police cars driving around, both of which yelled at me on loud speakers that there was severe weather and that I needed to get indoors. That didn't help me. I got an extremely sour taste in my mouth, and that was probably about the most scared I've ever been. The whole time I was just keeping my eye on which building I was going to run to if I heard the train noise again. I kept trying to call my mom and Cara and other people and nobody was answering and half the time I would get a message that said all circuits were busy and the other half of the time it would just say "Call Ended." before it even started ringing.
I finally got back home and found people. We were getting bits of reports from my mom and from Amelia that there was some damage downtown, that a church had its roof blown off and stuff, and Amelia said Dairy Queen's roof was blown off and that Hannah was working there when it happened. She and her brother started walking downtown and Cara and I left to meet them. As Cara and I were walking out of the building, the sirens went off again and Amelia and Owen ran to my dad's house and found Denise there, who told them it was just the all-clear siren. Denise also told them that my dad was acting batallion chief and thus was in charge of the whole fire department and gave them a little more information about this seemingly increasingly disastrous storm. As Cara and I were walking down Clinton St. we saw emergency lights, lots of cars, and throngs of people over towards Burlington and kept walking that way. When we were by the pet store across from the Old Capitol Mall, we saw a piece of a wall or roof that had been blown into a No Parking sign; the wall/roof piece was bent like a piece of paper and the signpost was at a 45-degree angle to the ground. Then we looked over and saw that the window where the cats live was broken out and all the kitties were gone! We thought that was bad and probably most of the worst of it, but to our horror we were soon to discover that that kind of damage and worse was commonplace.
There was junk and debris all over the sidewalk and street and there were very strange smells in the air. In the intersection of Burlington and Clinton there was a big white shed. In the parking lot by the Mill we saw what looked like the remains of a dumpster shredded into pieces no bigger than two feet by five feet at the largest. We walked east and saw a huge pile of debris under the Mill's sign. As we walked past the restaurant, we saw the glass door had been broken and boarded up, and then when we got to the east side of the restaurant I happened to turn around and saw that the sign on that side of the building was falling off at a gut-wrenching angle. And just behind the sign I noticed traffic lights were missing from their poles. We kept going and saw entire traffic light poles shredded and thrown down to the ground and scaffolding from an apartment building under construction mangled and smashed into the side of the building. Then we ran into Amelia and Owen. We wandered around with them for a while and left them at The Pit, then they went home. It was getting pretty crazy outside, because thousands of college kids were drunk and partying and pretty sure the tornado was a funny joke. Cara and I went back to Daum to get my laptop to dump her pictures on (her memory card was full by this point), some substantial shoes for her, and some sweatshirts, blankets, and extra batteries just in case, all in my backpack. Then we found Emileigh and Alissa and went off to see more.
It was just incredible. Rebel Plaza, that right-angle strip-mall kind of thing on Clinton across from the post office and by the courthouse, had places where you could look through the windows and see the sky through the lack of roof. That beautiful old brick building just west of Rebel Plaza that had a law firm in it is now only two stories tall instead of three. We found St. Patrick's church, and the damage was worse than I had even imagined. About half the roof was lifted off completely, and a bunch of the inside of the church is just filled with rubble. I think it was around there we saw a stop sign with street signs on top, and the street signs were turned at a right angle to the ground.
There were trees up all over the place and debris everywhere. Mailboxes of Iowa City was having the same problem that Rebel Plaza was where you could see the sky through the windows, and that beautiful old blue house with the antique store in it has joined the law firm in now being only two stories tall instead of three. There were windows that popped outwards all over the place, making me really believe (even though I've been told all my life, it's hard to really trust it) that you should open your windows in a tornado. Signs for businesses all over were smashed to smithereens, and a whole section of top part of the south wall of the Rec Center pool was missing, so you could see the ceiling of the pool room. I think you could see the wall inside leaning against the windows.
Then we walked to College Green Park, at Amelia's suggestion. Outside the L&M Mighty Mart, there was a car turned upside-down and crashed into a tree, strong smells of gas in the air, and some downed electrical wires. We left pretty quickly. My dad called and told me that "the whole city is fucked up," that there's damage from Menards and Wal-Mart in the southwest, up Riverside Drive, over on Burlington, through downtown, and over as far as the City High area. He really was the guy in charge of the fire crews all night until they relieved him right before he called me a little after midnight, which must have been super-stressful, especially since I saw vehicles from nearly all the emergency teams from the whole county, including all the fire departments, lots of police and sherriff's deputies, and even the National Guard and Red Cross folks. He also told me that he had been in the BC van responding to a call when the storm went right over them. He said something went through the van and two of the windows were broken out. Way scary.
As we pressed on towards College Green Park, we kept seeing huge pieces of metal twisted beyond recognition just lying around on the ground. We approached the park and saw one tree stuck in another tree with more pieces of metal wedged in there. There was a piece of roof that blew into a see-saw and the nail that came off with the roof must have hit the see-saw with such a force that now the roof is nailed to the see-saw. Miraculously, other than the see-saw now being shingled, the play equipment survived totally unscathed. The bottom two feet of a pine tree were hanging out by the play equipment, the whole top 40 or so feet of the tree totally gone. We saw some downed electrical wires near there and steered clear, eventually making it back to the Daum area. On our way we saw a truck bed liner sitting on the sidewalk and saw news teams from Des Moines. Emiliegh and Thalia, whom we ran into by the church, went back home, but Cara and I went to The Pit for some food and then walked over across the river to see what happened on Riverside Drive.
There were some blocks sectioned off, so we had to make detours, but we basically followed the path of destruction back where it came from. We crossed the Burlington Street bridge and walked past the hydraulics laboratory. Right past that, there was an uprooted tree and what looked to me like it might have been ground torn up going down into the river, but I don't know if that was there before. Anyway, the tornado went across the river before it got to the hydraulics laboratory, probably hit the power plant and dissipated a bit, and then came back down hard on Burlington St.
We kept walking south on Riverside, and saw a couple more uprooted trees. There was a car parked in the parking lot that was sitting with its left tires up on a curb. I'm pretty sure they didn't park their car like that, and that the tornado just kinda moved the car over about a foot. There were also a bunch of trees with wisps of pink insulation in their branches. We crossed the street to Kum & Go and saw pieces of the Hungry Hobo sign in their parking lot, then looked across the street and saw our query: Amelia wasn't lying when she said Dairy Queen was destroyed. Every part of the structure that wasn't cinder blocks is just gone, nowhere to be found. We talked to some owner-type people who were hanging out there and were told that even though the roof was torn off, there are styrofoam cups on dry-storage shelves right under the missing roof that didn't even move an inch.
By this point we were both so exhausted that we had to get back to Daum. I've been sitting here for hours now going through the pictures and writing this. I'm totally awestruck. I had always had this notion that cities couldn't get hit by tornados because the buildings break up the wind. I should have known better; I've always heard stories of tornados going through big cities, so I should have known it was more than possible in this smallish city. It's so totally weird though. All these big old buildings in this place, this my hometown where I have always lived that I know and love so well, have been just shredded by this storm that came out of nowhere on a day when not two hours before everyone was commenting on how beautiful the weather was.
I have an overpowering urge to go and see everything that happened, to go out to Menards and Wal-Mart, and see everything that happened on the whole path over through to the Summit Street area. I already know that there's a lot of stuff in places I didn't get anywhere near, and I guess I just want to make sure that places I love aren't destroyed, and if they are, to make sure I know about it. I'm so glad that classes were cancelled for tomorrow, because I totally couldn't deal with it.
Cara took about 200 pictures tonight, and there are sure to be lots more taken tomorrow. Maybe sometime I'll get some of them up. If you're looking for pictures, go to www.press-citizen.com and they have some pictures their photographers took of a bunch of stuff, plus three or four articles.
Today after German instead of going to work I grabbed my guitar and walked to the Ped Mall. I met a guy named Nathan from Minneapolis who had a guitar, and got to talking with him and after a while we started jamming together. The music he played seemed to be a lot like the music I play, and I really felt like I could jam well with him. I've never felt quite like that when playing with someone, that we both wanted exactly the same out of the music. Anyway, it was a beautiful day, but I had to get to my Interpretation of Lit class at EPB (English and Philosophy Building, for non UI folks).
It was so nice that we held the first half of class outside, until it started raining. Then, around 8:10, we heard tornado sirens and managed to convince our teacher to move down to the basement hallway from our second-floor classroom. She was pretty sure nothing was going to happen, but gave in. On our way down, we looked out the doors and saw hail the size of ping-pong balls. It was pretty weird. We finished the last twenty minutes of class in the basement, and then she told us all to go home and be safe. I walked over to the east entrance of the building and opened the door. The tornado sirens seemed somehow more insistent than usual and the sky didn't seem right. A guy came out of the building behind me with his laptop, telling me about some movie he had been watching and something he was writing, and then he started asking me about how it was living in the "end times". We looked at the sky, and the clouds were all moving so fast.
All of a sudden that didn't matter though: I heard a huge WHOOSH sound coming from every direction, and in the south, over by Riverside Drive, I saw the tornado. It was the classic train noise, and it looked really big and white, just like a huge triange splitting the sky in two. I really didn't like it and was getting pretty scared, so I went back in the building and told the people from my class who were still there that I thought I had just seen a tornado. My teacher asked to borrow my cell phone, and then John Pienta and I went to look out the south door. There were some janitor-type people there, and we listened and heard the roaring noise some more, this time coming from more of an easterly direction, over by Burlington Street and the Lindquist Center. After a bit it just stopped, and the janitors were offering us popcorn and saying that they thought the roaring noise had just been the forced-air system (which I know from having to dig through hundreds of blueprints is jargon for the ventilation part of HVAC, which itself is jargon for Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning).
It wasn't the forced air system, it was a tornado going through downtown Iowa City.
I waited for a while more in the basement of EPB, then decided I needed to get back to Daum. I went back outside and the sirens weren't going, but when I had gotten just as far as Adler, they blared up again and I freaked out and went in there for a few minutes. Eventually I remembered the sirens go on and off and decided to head out again. That trek from EPB to Daum seemed so inconceivably long. I saw three cars on the street the whole time, and two of them were police cars driving around, both of which yelled at me on loud speakers that there was severe weather and that I needed to get indoors. That didn't help me. I got an extremely sour taste in my mouth, and that was probably about the most scared I've ever been. The whole time I was just keeping my eye on which building I was going to run to if I heard the train noise again. I kept trying to call my mom and Cara and other people and nobody was answering and half the time I would get a message that said all circuits were busy and the other half of the time it would just say "Call Ended." before it even started ringing.
I finally got back home and found people. We were getting bits of reports from my mom and from Amelia that there was some damage downtown, that a church had its roof blown off and stuff, and Amelia said Dairy Queen's roof was blown off and that Hannah was working there when it happened. She and her brother started walking downtown and Cara and I left to meet them. As Cara and I were walking out of the building, the sirens went off again and Amelia and Owen ran to my dad's house and found Denise there, who told them it was just the all-clear siren. Denise also told them that my dad was acting batallion chief and thus was in charge of the whole fire department and gave them a little more information about this seemingly increasingly disastrous storm. As Cara and I were walking down Clinton St. we saw emergency lights, lots of cars, and throngs of people over towards Burlington and kept walking that way. When we were by the pet store across from the Old Capitol Mall, we saw a piece of a wall or roof that had been blown into a No Parking sign; the wall/roof piece was bent like a piece of paper and the signpost was at a 45-degree angle to the ground. Then we looked over and saw that the window where the cats live was broken out and all the kitties were gone! We thought that was bad and probably most of the worst of it, but to our horror we were soon to discover that that kind of damage and worse was commonplace.
There was junk and debris all over the sidewalk and street and there were very strange smells in the air. In the intersection of Burlington and Clinton there was a big white shed. In the parking lot by the Mill we saw what looked like the remains of a dumpster shredded into pieces no bigger than two feet by five feet at the largest. We walked east and saw a huge pile of debris under the Mill's sign. As we walked past the restaurant, we saw the glass door had been broken and boarded up, and then when we got to the east side of the restaurant I happened to turn around and saw that the sign on that side of the building was falling off at a gut-wrenching angle. And just behind the sign I noticed traffic lights were missing from their poles. We kept going and saw entire traffic light poles shredded and thrown down to the ground and scaffolding from an apartment building under construction mangled and smashed into the side of the building. Then we ran into Amelia and Owen. We wandered around with them for a while and left them at The Pit, then they went home. It was getting pretty crazy outside, because thousands of college kids were drunk and partying and pretty sure the tornado was a funny joke. Cara and I went back to Daum to get my laptop to dump her pictures on (her memory card was full by this point), some substantial shoes for her, and some sweatshirts, blankets, and extra batteries just in case, all in my backpack. Then we found Emileigh and Alissa and went off to see more.
It was just incredible. Rebel Plaza, that right-angle strip-mall kind of thing on Clinton across from the post office and by the courthouse, had places where you could look through the windows and see the sky through the lack of roof. That beautiful old brick building just west of Rebel Plaza that had a law firm in it is now only two stories tall instead of three. We found St. Patrick's church, and the damage was worse than I had even imagined. About half the roof was lifted off completely, and a bunch of the inside of the church is just filled with rubble. I think it was around there we saw a stop sign with street signs on top, and the street signs were turned at a right angle to the ground.
There were trees up all over the place and debris everywhere. Mailboxes of Iowa City was having the same problem that Rebel Plaza was where you could see the sky through the windows, and that beautiful old blue house with the antique store in it has joined the law firm in now being only two stories tall instead of three. There were windows that popped outwards all over the place, making me really believe (even though I've been told all my life, it's hard to really trust it) that you should open your windows in a tornado. Signs for businesses all over were smashed to smithereens, and a whole section of top part of the south wall of the Rec Center pool was missing, so you could see the ceiling of the pool room. I think you could see the wall inside leaning against the windows.
Then we walked to College Green Park, at Amelia's suggestion. Outside the L&M Mighty Mart, there was a car turned upside-down and crashed into a tree, strong smells of gas in the air, and some downed electrical wires. We left pretty quickly. My dad called and told me that "the whole city is fucked up," that there's damage from Menards and Wal-Mart in the southwest, up Riverside Drive, over on Burlington, through downtown, and over as far as the City High area. He really was the guy in charge of the fire crews all night until they relieved him right before he called me a little after midnight, which must have been super-stressful, especially since I saw vehicles from nearly all the emergency teams from the whole county, including all the fire departments, lots of police and sherriff's deputies, and even the National Guard and Red Cross folks. He also told me that he had been in the BC van responding to a call when the storm went right over them. He said something went through the van and two of the windows were broken out. Way scary.
As we pressed on towards College Green Park, we kept seeing huge pieces of metal twisted beyond recognition just lying around on the ground. We approached the park and saw one tree stuck in another tree with more pieces of metal wedged in there. There was a piece of roof that blew into a see-saw and the nail that came off with the roof must have hit the see-saw with such a force that now the roof is nailed to the see-saw. Miraculously, other than the see-saw now being shingled, the play equipment survived totally unscathed. The bottom two feet of a pine tree were hanging out by the play equipment, the whole top 40 or so feet of the tree totally gone. We saw some downed electrical wires near there and steered clear, eventually making it back to the Daum area. On our way we saw a truck bed liner sitting on the sidewalk and saw news teams from Des Moines. Emiliegh and Thalia, whom we ran into by the church, went back home, but Cara and I went to The Pit for some food and then walked over across the river to see what happened on Riverside Drive.
There were some blocks sectioned off, so we had to make detours, but we basically followed the path of destruction back where it came from. We crossed the Burlington Street bridge and walked past the hydraulics laboratory. Right past that, there was an uprooted tree and what looked to me like it might have been ground torn up going down into the river, but I don't know if that was there before. Anyway, the tornado went across the river before it got to the hydraulics laboratory, probably hit the power plant and dissipated a bit, and then came back down hard on Burlington St.
We kept walking south on Riverside, and saw a couple more uprooted trees. There was a car parked in the parking lot that was sitting with its left tires up on a curb. I'm pretty sure they didn't park their car like that, and that the tornado just kinda moved the car over about a foot. There were also a bunch of trees with wisps of pink insulation in their branches. We crossed the street to Kum & Go and saw pieces of the Hungry Hobo sign in their parking lot, then looked across the street and saw our query: Amelia wasn't lying when she said Dairy Queen was destroyed. Every part of the structure that wasn't cinder blocks is just gone, nowhere to be found. We talked to some owner-type people who were hanging out there and were told that even though the roof was torn off, there are styrofoam cups on dry-storage shelves right under the missing roof that didn't even move an inch.
By this point we were both so exhausted that we had to get back to Daum. I've been sitting here for hours now going through the pictures and writing this. I'm totally awestruck. I had always had this notion that cities couldn't get hit by tornados because the buildings break up the wind. I should have known better; I've always heard stories of tornados going through big cities, so I should have known it was more than possible in this smallish city. It's so totally weird though. All these big old buildings in this place, this my hometown where I have always lived that I know and love so well, have been just shredded by this storm that came out of nowhere on a day when not two hours before everyone was commenting on how beautiful the weather was.
I have an overpowering urge to go and see everything that happened, to go out to Menards and Wal-Mart, and see everything that happened on the whole path over through to the Summit Street area. I already know that there's a lot of stuff in places I didn't get anywhere near, and I guess I just want to make sure that places I love aren't destroyed, and if they are, to make sure I know about it. I'm so glad that classes were cancelled for tomorrow, because I totally couldn't deal with it.
Cara took about 200 pictures tonight, and there are sure to be lots more taken tomorrow. Maybe sometime I'll get some of them up. If you're looking for pictures, go to www.press-citizen.com and they have some pictures their photographers took of a bunch of stuff, plus three or four articles.