Larmeir.com

Having lived in tornado alley my whole life I’ve become pretty used to tornadoes spawning during thunderstorms. In fact, I’ve seen a few tornadoes up close and would be quite content to not see one again. There’s one encounter though that I will never forget, and that one was the 1995 tornado that hit Ardmore Oklahoma.

I was 14 at the time and was riding with my parents in their car and we were hearing reports of bad weather being all around. We stopped at a Hardees just north of Ardmore and picked up some lunch and I had ordered a fish sandwich. We just started taking off down the road when I noticed that I forgot Tartar sauce! Being a teenager, I made a big deal about this and argued with Dad until he decided to turn around. I then ran back inside Hardees to grab some tartar sauce took off down the road again and when we rolled into Ardmore just a few minutes away this is what we saw:

Had I not bugged the heck out of dad and went in and grabbed that tartar sauce, we would have been right in the middle of pretty powerful tornado. I remember how surreal it was to see the Uniroyal tire plant still burning, the metal guard rails on the freeway bent over like tin foil, and the debris that was all over the place. Nature is a amazing thing, but it can be pretty cruel  and on this day many people were affected.

Here’s some youtube footage of the same tornado:

I was browsing through my Flickr account today and stumbled upon this gallery which  prompted me to post this.

The images are forever burned into my mind.