Weather

Last Friday morning at 5 a.m. my wife Pat and I were awakened by our cell phones going off due to a tornado warning. At thesametime,ourhome’s alarm system went off with the tornado warning and within a minute or two Shawnee sounded its tornado warning sirens.

Shawnee repeated its warning sirens a second time. A couple of minutes later, my boss Brian texted me making sure I was awake because weather might be headed our way.

One of the first things we did was turn on the TV to see the latest storm update and as I did Pat told me to make sure and grab the cat who was in the garage in case we needed to go to our secure place we could take her with us.

This all occurred within a matter of a few minutes. We continued to watch the TV, then all of a sudden it had no signal, but it came back on and it appeared we were in the clear as the storm stayed north of us and headed towards Lincoln County.

My wife had planned to go to Carney that morning for a legislative breakfast, but with the storms and all still brewing in the area that pretty well nixed that.

I was relieved when she said she wasn’t going. As probably many if not most of you all are aware, we had another round of storms that began out in western Oklahoma on late Saturday morning, moving eastward into the central, southern and eastern portions of the state. It turned out to be a horrific evening and night of deadly tornadoes and heavy thunderstorms.

Tragically and unfortunately they took the lives of at least four persons, destroyed some areas and heavily damaged others.

Again, we were tuned into the TV weather, watching the meteorologists and their staffs and keeping an eye on the tornadoes that struck near cities where we have loved ones and friends.

Pat and I stayed up until around midnight and at that point we felt the worst of the worst was hopefully over.

On Sunday, I sat down and took a little time and thought back to what all had occurred since those early morning hours on Friday.

What I realized is how grateful we were awakened by our cell phones and house alarm system going off and notifying us of severe storms in the area, my boss quickly letting us know, too, we needed to be aware of what was taking place.

And all of this is possible because of the technology we have today and how far we have come in really a pretty short time. We have capabilities today that 10, 15 years ago we might not have even imagined.

I’m thankful, too, for all the meteorologists and storm trackers who do such a good job spotting and tracking these storms.

Weather prognosticators are forecasting more storms for later this week and possibly through the weekend again.

It’s good to know we can count on them and our cell phones, alarm systems and friends who are concerned about us.