Tornado Alley
Posted by Pete | Posted in News | Posted on 22-05-2013
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My family used to live in Decatur, Tx, right in the tornado alley. When storm clouds came up I was as nervous as a cat. Many nights I paced the floor, going from window to window, keeping watch for the tale-tale signs of the tornado dipping down from the clouds. Luckily, we were spared the trauma of going through that heart ache. I can’t help it, but yesterday as the folks on tv were talking about their losses, some tears came, but I don’t know if I fully comprehend just what all they are going through, to lose everything collected over their lifetime….and to think about starting all over. Yet I am sure they are thankful for that opportunity. Their lives were spared and they count their blessings. Won’t you join me in saying a prayer for those who lost everything, those who lost family members and all those who must go through the rebuilding process and land clean-up? As we pray for them, we also need to thank our Lord God for sparing us from storms, floods, fires and all kind of events that can take all of our homes and belongings away from us. “Hear our prayers, oh Lord, and bless all our hurting people.”…Pete
Isn’t Decatur, TX a suburb of Fort Worth like Moore, OK is a suburb of Oklahoma City? Hasn’t Fort Worth been hit by just about as many Texas-size tornados as has Oklahoma City? You may have been living in one of the two places on earth where you may have undergone just such an experience. It may have been a good thing that you headed back to New Mexico. Its lack of tornadoes is one of the things that I learned to like about the New Mexico climate although I did occasionally hear of a few in the southeast part of the state, but I was told that these were only small ones that had gotten lost and were run out of Texas.
Then, there were the little sand devils that reminded me of the tornadoes back home. These were small and had not the power of an Alabama tornado of the Sixties, much less that of Texas-size and Oklahoma-size mega ones today. I am reminded of the day I was bicycling in a brisk New Mexico enchanted wind where a vast amount of enchantment was being picked up for its daily treak to Texas when I was caught up in one of these sand devils. As tornados go, it was small, but it was large enough to run me off the road and dump my bicycle into the ditch. After that, I paid particular attention to those sun devils, even the ones, like this one, that came upon me from the rear. Perhaps I shouldn’t be writing about my experience wirh New Mexico sun devils so soon after an F-5 tornado has just passed through Moore, Oklahoma, but this was the Sixties in the past century when I had never heard of Moore, Oklahoma or, for that matter, and F-5 tornado.
The southeast corner of New Mexico tends to have some bad storms, usually hail and high winds, but some twisters have come through to do some damage. However, nothing like the Lubbock, Tx and northeast of there on up through Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, etc….and you know all that…Decatur was right in the middle of that tornado alley. We lived there 3 years while I worked at General Dynamics in Fort Worth, 30 miles or so to the south. Pete
You mean it was only three years. It certainly seemed longer than that to me, but this was the period of my life when I was at Kirtland, when time dragged by so slowly and when we were progressing through one radiation experiment after another with animals that all looked the same, but they weren’t the same. The sheep involved knew that they weren’t the same. “Hey! I’m a real live sheep. I don’t like this radiation stuff.” I knew that they weren’t the same with only a brief look at their blood chemistry prior to their death, as all of them responded differently to the radiation energy, just as troops in the field would respond differently in the event of an exposure in a real atomic war. It was much better learning about the response to the radiation energy from the sheep than learning it from troops in the field in a real, shooting war. I think about our sheep martyrs often. Bless their little hearts, especially the ones that went to the reactor kiva pregnant, and our DVM’s didn’t even know it. Doctors aren’t perfect. Sometimes they can’t even tell when a sheep is with a lamb. The amazing thing is that the lamb often survived exposure even after the adult sheep died. Life is great! Even radiation is not the ultimate death sentence, which brings us to the real, ultimate death sentence, at least for human live, and that is the sin of apostasy, the sin of once professing Christ as one’s Lord and Saviour, and then deliberately, maliciously, and selfishly denying the profession for the sake of self, material possessions, and selfish pursuits and ambitions, thus elevating self into one’s own god.