Iowa / Nebraska folks okay?

[frankmcr]

Looks like that was a bad one.

[KenL]

The town of Elkhorn, NE (now a suburb of Omaha) got hit hard.

We lived there for 14 years. Nice town with excellent public schools. My wife was a teacher in the district.

Our former house and neighborhood was spared by a quarter-mile. But I've seen numerous pictures and videos of the damage, and it's devastating. Whole neighborhoods destroyed.

I heard of a couple who closed on a new house on Friday morning, and the house was destroyed 4 hours later.

No fatalities, which is a miracle.

[Mr. Jelly]

We live on the western border of Iowa, and we were not touched or did we see anything threatening. We did have a lot of weather TV coverage about what was going on east of us.

There are some very interesting YouTube videos showing many tornados and the damage. It's worth checking out.

[Wade Hampton]

I don’t have any input into these recent storms in Nebraska and Iowa, but grew up in Tornado Alley in a Johnson County, Kansas suburb of Kansas City. There are tornado sirens mounted on high poles on the street corners, and you hear them when a tornado threat is imminent.

My father had a bomb shelter built in our basement during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and while that threat passed the threat from tornados in that region has never gone away.

So we used the bomb shelter as a tornado shelter instead. We had canned food and bottled water and board games that we only played when we were hunkered down there sitting out the danger.

More than once we were just about to sit down to eat dinner when the sirens went off. We’d just take our plates and silverware down to the shelter and have our meal at the card table we had in there.

Here in Alaska we’ve got plenty of natural phenomena to worry about, primarily earthquakes and volcanic eruptions (both of which I’ve experienced up here.) But we don’t have the sort of tornados typical of Tornado Alley, and thank God for that.


Wade Hampton Miller

[imwjl]

Folks I know are okay.

This stuff hits home in two ways. Since 2018 we had a freak and extreme flood, and a small tornado touch down only blocks away. Oh that was rotten in the cleanup and repair even though we were all okay. It was expensive even having insurance.

I advise everyone to get their municipality acting as ours did. We - the city - did a 5 year plan to not just repair but fortify and fix a a lot of things for next time. It has already paid. Last year storms did no flooding. New building codes are better surviving the extremes. It was about $275 total added to our sewer and water bill. Wow was that a bargain vs what happened from those big events.

It was easy to get the whole city to do all those fixes and proactive steps because there wasn't anyone who did not have costs from the big events. The way they seem to be increasing is why I suggest everyone get their municipality at it.

You also want your municipality to be organized for FEMA claims. Ours was first in the state to have the claims done after the flood and tornado event. Wow does that make a difference too. It was quite simple for something so effective. Each city council district had designated volunteers, and all the parks' public lands volunteers helped.

Here's the neatest thing about that. The proactive efforts help produce an old fashioned good neighbor vibe people often gripe doesn't exist.

Good luck all!

[Mr. Jelly]

It's taken as a granted around my area that our extreme weather issues do not make much national news. Though when our weather issues move east as it most often does it becomes national news. We just wait three or four days and hear how bad it is for the people out east.

You won't believe this but I'm waiting for the tornado sirens to go off any second. My car is parked outside because I'm moving, and my garage is full. Here's hoping for no hail.