Just checking in on all our friends in the South. You guys all ok? Looks like yesterday was Rough for you guys!
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Yeah, all good here. A tornado spun up about 2 miles from our place and just missed us at about 10 p.m. last night. There is widespread damage all over the state though. I think Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina all got the brunt of this storm though.
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Weirdest thing about living in South Carolina the last 2 years. We get scary tornadoes!
Last night was bad. Someone was killed just outside Clemson from a tornado that touched down about 3am. It was super loud. It wasn’t super close to us when it touched down, Clemson is 15 minutes away…I’m not sure how far it traveled towards us. But it was traveling our direction.
I was scared and having grown up in OK, I’m generally pretty tough about this stuff. I’m pretty sure a lot of friends are going to have tree damage today. We’re good though!
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The weirdest part about living outside of Oklahoma for the first time is the lack of quality sever weather coverage. There were tornadoes all over the state and the flagship station for weather coverage featuring James Spann (who is regionally well-known, not just Alabama famous) and they had 2 storm chasers out. Once the storm chasers found the first signs of tornado damage at like 3 p.m., they stopped following storms and started reporting from the towns that got hit first. So for the last 8 hours of last night, there were no chasers. Everything was “well based on the debris signatures we think there might possibly be a tornado on the ground”. Nobody had eyes on anything.
Also, if there weren’t active tornado warnings they flipped it over to American Idol. The storm that produced the huge tornado through Mississippi that killed 6 people came over into the state and rotation weakened. They took the warning off. They immediately stopped covering it. It then dropped a tornado out of nowhere and we heard the sirens outside of our apartment before weather coverage broke back in. I don’t understand it.
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Yes, I agree! Though Spann is amazing!
What floored me was there would be a watch that popped up in mid-morning and Tuscaloosa City & County Schools would shut down early. I’d have to shuffle everything at work, pick up the kids in really bad weather and then we’d go sit at home. Now granted, we bought an all brick home for the weather reason, but there aren’t many basements of storm shelters there. So I’m thinking it would be safer to stay at school.
Funny video about him.
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There was a tornado not too far outside of Denver a few years ago. An Oklahoma girl in my department that had moved up there was the only one that really knew what to do when the office had to take tornado precautions. And no, her advice was to not go stand by the glass windows on the 12th floor and take pictures. 
Really weird what you get used to when you grow up in it.
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Oh I 100% agree. James Spann is really good at his job. I just think the resources and full team available to him are lacking. I would imagine it isn’t Spann’s decision to cut away from sever weather coverage. I am a firm believer in respecting the polygon.
Also, that video is hilariously accurate. He had a grainy shot from some tornado damage in the middle of nowhere last night and was able to identify some old bait shop and a gas station that had changed branding twice just by looking at what essentially was a pile of steel and wood.
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Yeah, I agree with your coworker. The 12th floor windows aren’t great. Gotta go stand outside at ground level to get the optimal viewing angle.
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Everyone likes to make fun of News 9 but it’s nice to have two helicopters and like 12 storm trackers if needed.
I lived in Kansas for five years and the stations up there had one, maybe two storm trackers for the whole state.
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Someone on Twitter posted a video, presumably from last night, where Spann referenced the location of a strip club (by name) when he was covering the weather. Thought that was funny.
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That is absolutely incredible. The only thing that would surprise me is if he couldn’t name the owner and some of the talent currently employed.
In his defense, he also did name a BBQ place and the name of a public school. But that may have been for cover.
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I mean…that’s what I’d do. 
He can name everything. He knows the entire state down to the little dirt roads. It’s truly savant-like. He made me feel safe living in Tuscaloosa the way Gary England did in Oklahoma.
Greenville has these two guys that look like they graduated from OU yesterday. Chris Justus and Cedric Haynes. They are alright…but look not as weathered.
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When living in Cincinnati, in the spring of 2011, there was a really bad storm that rolled through, probably the worst I’ve encountered (and that’s including growing up in Tulsa, mind you).
To give some context to this, in February I moved into this renovated old building in a “gentrified” neighborhood called Over-the-Rhine. So the building was kinda old, but sturdy. They replaced the windows to the extent they were allowed (historic preservation laws).
So this new friend, he was from Toledo, he calls me at 12:30 at night, when the storm is raging and the sirens are going off. He says “are we supposed to all go downstairs to the basement?”. I just told him to go back to sleep. 
Everything turned out fine. 
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Drove 4hrs in a blizzard yesterday. So ready for Spring
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Wow, there were 3 tornadoes in my area last night. The one closest to us was close but very small. The one I talked about this morning was an F3 outside Clemson. There was also an F2 north of Greenville. We were lucky.
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