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One-two punches seem to abound....

James Burke

James Burke

Being a grandpa is more fun than working
Very little news on the 5.7 earthquake in Salt Lake City yesterday. Nowhere to be found on the major news sites without having to search for it. That would have made front page news for at least the good part of the week....but absolutely nothing.

Now, it's tornadoes in Texas today. Here in Michigan, they've predicted some bumpy weather tonight and I wonder if we might find ourselves in the same boat.

Anyway, I'm glad we have the S101 community to help mitigate the crazy string of events we're seeing. Even amidst the continual stream of bad news, the encouragement has been helpful.


JB
 
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bannertime

Active Member
Yeah, I briefly caught a headline about the earthquake yesterday on our shop tv. I honestly didn't even know about any tornadoes here. Will have to look that up.
 
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Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
I'm fairly tired from the noisy, stormy night we had. Big storms came roaring through town after 2:00am. There were several tornado warnings just South of the Red River in North Texas earlier. Our local ABC affiliate wiped out most of the network programming yesterday evening due to severe weather cut-ins. I chatted with my parents in the Colorado Springs area; they were dealing with an incoming blizzard. They didn't feel the earthquake in Utah. A 5.7 temblor is pretty stout. We had a 5.3 here in November of 2011. My living room felt like a boat out on the lake. Anyway, I was talking with one of my coworkers yesterday about the possible double-whammy of this coronavirus outbreak happening just as Spring storm season is getting under way. It would be a hell of a thing for a city or town reeling from COVID-19 cases to suddenly have to deal with a tornado emergency at the same time.
 
Texas_Signmaker

Texas_Signmaker

Very Active Signmaker
bannertime said:
Yeah, I briefly caught a headline about the earthquake yesterday on our shop tv. I honestly didn't even know about any tornadoes here. Will have to look that up.
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It was just northwest of the metroplex, like near decatur or Bridgeport somewhere up there. All that news is getting buried by coronavirus
 
James Burke

James Burke

Being a grandpa is more fun than working
Bobby H said:
It would be a hell of a thing for a city or town reeling from COVID-19 cases to suddenly have to deal with a tornado emergency at the same time.
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Ahem....remember Nashville? First the tornadoes, then the virus panic. Sad, but not much has been said about them lately, but I'm sure they're hurting pretty badly.

JB
 
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bannertime

Active Member
Texas_Signmaker said:
It was just northwest of the metroplex, like near decatur or Bridgeport somewhere up there. All that news is getting buried by coronavirus
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Oh, well, glad I didn't put up that lot sign yet just outside Alvord. Ground is probably wet enough to dig into now. All rocks up there.
 
J

Joe House

Sign Equipment Technician
Hang in there everyone. (easily said as it's bright and sunny here in the beautiful Pacific NW) We'll all come out the other side of this a little stronger.
 
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Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
Texas_Signmaker said:
It was just northwest of the metroplex, like near decatur or Bridgeport somewhere up there. All that news is getting buried by coronavirus
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During the live coverage I watched (some of which featured news crews chasing storms) one storm was tracking near Graham and Jacksboro. Another one looked like it passed close to Bowie a while earlier. Montague County gets lots of tornadic storms.

Texas_Signmaker said:
Tornadoes got very little coverage around here.
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It's the opposite here. Sheesh, we get network programming interrupted with weather cut-ins just for garden variety thunderstorms. When the tornado watches get issued there goes that evening's programming. KSWO-TV (ABC) in Lawton by far does the most cut-ins in the Lawton-Wichita Falls viewing market. The Fox, NBC and CBS affiliates in Wichita Falls do their own share of cut-ins, but not like KSWO. Plus, KSWO has this very annoying beep beep beep thing that goes off constantly with their on-screen weather text crawls. I just end up having to change the channel, watch Netflix or throw in a Blu-ray. I find the beeping noise to be intolerable.
 
Texas_Signmaker

Texas_Signmaker

Very Active Signmaker
WildWestDesigns said:
Raining right now as a matter of fact. Storms due in later this evening.
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Doesnt surprise me. I was in Memphis last month and on the drive up there you could see endless flat land with farms completely flooded. Looked like I was driving through an ocean. We had an install get delayed almost two months because the sign trucks were sinking in the mud and couldn't reach the sign. Got an install delayed in Birmingham cause the ground is like mush. Rain is crazy this year.
 
Notarealsignguy

Notarealsignguy

Arial - it's almost helvetica
I saw earthquake coverage from multiple sources down in florida. Tornados too. Isnt it getting into that season?
You all realize that these news places are aggregators and feed you headlines based on stuff you search for and look at. So if you spend a bunch of time looking at and talking about coronavirus, thats going to dominate your headlines. If you went digging around looking for a bunch of tornado news, chances are you would see much more. We dont all see the same headlines.
 
James Burke

James Burke

Being a grandpa is more fun than working
Notarealsignguy said:
I saw earthquake coverage from multiple sources down in florida. Tornados too. Isnt it getting into that season?
You all realize that these news places are aggregators and feed you headlines based on stuff you search for and look at. So if you spend a bunch of time looking at and talking about coronavirus, thats going to dominate your headlines. If you went digging around looking for a bunch of tornado news, chances are you would see much more. We dont all see the same headlines.
Click to expand...

We'll see about that. If you think it's crazy now, wait until hurricane season hits.


JB
 
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Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
"Dixie Alley" is definitely a real thing now, a second legit tornado alley. I'm just hoping we have a pretty mild, not so eventful storm season this year. But it has been relatively quiet in my part of Oklahoma the past few years. And Lawton itself has been relatively lucky, this town hasn't had a serious tornado strike within the city limits since the Terrible Tuesday outbreak over 40 years ago (4/10/79). That's the one known for the massive F4 tornado (an EF-5 by today's scale) that slammed Wichita Falls. Nearly 60 confirmed tornadoes were recorded in that outbreak. Lawton has hit by an F3 tornado (probably an EF-4 today). 3 people in town were killed. But that paled in comparison to the destruction in Wichita Falls where 42 people were killed. Another tornado that hit Vernon killed 11 people the same day.

Lawton has dodged many bad storms. But some horrible ones were born here only to do their worst up the road. The May 3, 1999 storm that spawned an F5 with the fastest wind speeds ever recorded in a tornado (over 300mph) was formed over the Lawton Fort Sill area. That one devastated parts of Moore and Oklahoma City. I still remember how hot and humid it was that afternoon and how that storm blew up out of the blue. Worst weather I've seen in my time here was a "heat burst" that hit Lawton around Memorial Day weekend in 1996 (it was like the city was hit by a hurricane). Then there was one particularly horrible ice storm in 2010.
 
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Texas_Signmaker

Texas_Signmaker

Very Active Signmaker
Bobby H said:
"Dixie Alley" is definitely a real thing now, a second legit tornado alley. I'm just hoping we have a pretty mild, not so eventful storm season this year. But it has been relatively quiet in my part of Oklahoma the past few years. And Lawton itself has been relatively lucky, this town hasn't had a serious tornado strike within the city limits since the Terrible Tuesday outbreak over 40 years ago (4/10/79). That's the one known for the massive F4 tornado (an EF-5 by today's scale) that slammed Wichita Falls. Nearly 60 confirmed tornadoes were recorded in that outbreak. Lawton has hit by an F3 tornado (probably an EF-4 today). 3 people in town were killed. But that paled in comparison to the destruction in Wichita Falls where 42 people were killed. Another tornado that hit Vernon killed 11 people the same day.

Lawton has dodged many bad storms. But some horrible ones were born here only to do their worst up the road. The May 3, 1999 storm that spawned an F5 with the fastest wind speeds ever recorded in a tornado (over 300mph) was formed over the Lawton Fort Sill area. That one devastated parts of Moore and Oklahoma City. I still remember how hot and humid it was that afternoon and how that storm blew up out of the blue. Worst weather I've seen in my time here was a "heat burst" that hit Lawton around Memorial Day weekend in 1996 (it was like the city was hit by a hurricane). Then there was one particularly horrible ice storm in 2010.
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I had a bid to do in Vernon and the customer and I were in Wichita and he offered to drive his truck there and I could ride with. In a momentary lapse of judgement I agreed. He had to of been in his 70s or 80s but during the trip there he told me the story about that tornado. Interesting to hear a first-person account of it and how life was back then. He was a traveling salesman and was in Lubbock when it hit. The phones were down so he got word from someone over a Ham Radio that his family was OK. They had no cell phones and information was hard to come by.

That was an interesting morning for me, old people are full of good stories.
 
WildWestDesigns

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
Texas_Signmaker said:
That was an interesting morning for me, old people are full of good stories.
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That they are. My paternal grandmother who died in 2015 at the age of 101.5 was full of them. A lot of things that she lived through. Of course, that also meant a lot of "Y'all have it easy today, don't know what it was like back then....".

My paternal grandfather, all I have are cassette recordings of his/the family's story. I have since converted to digital.
 
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