My sister’s 2 year old daughter was in a house that got the back part blown off. Thankfully they had taken shelter and the entire household including my niece is safe. Unfortunately, the family is now left with a huge cleanup issue and has lost much of their belongings. My brother in law left the interstate and took shelter in a mall on his way home from work.

The scene is similar throughout Oklahoma. In Stillwater, we were lucky and much of the worst of the storms missed us. Not so for people near my home town in Pottawatomie County and Seminole County in Oklahoma. In fact, three of the dead tonight were in a town just a few miles from where I grew up, Tecumseh, Oklahoma. A Loves Truck Stop on I-40 took a direct hit, but there were no injuries there.

Ironically, The Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma just narrowly missed being hit. A tornado touched down just east of the building on the campus of the University of Oklahoma.

Thankfully we were warned about this storm well in advance. However, sometimes I think the pre-warning is almost too much here because we hear about it for days on end, and it starts to numb you to the possibility because it seems so commonplace. I don’t know what a good happy medium is, but taking over the entire network for hours on end each time it sprinkles may not be the best way to go. It may actually backfire and cause people to not take the warnings so seriously.
The word “tornadogeddon” is already making an appearance on blogs and Facebook. We can expect this outbreak will provide enough fodder for at least one episode of “Storm Stories” on The Weather Channel.

In Southeast Missouri, there’s no reason to panic, as the atmosphere is much more stable (thanks to the unseasonably cool weather). Thunderstorms are in the forecast for tonight and again tomorrow night, but the odds for severe storms and tornadoes are low (but above zero). The bigger threat is heavy rain and flooding.

The latest Hazardous Weather Outlook from the Paducah forecast office says vaguely, “THERE IS A CHANCE OF THUNDERSTORMS THROUGH TONIGHT. ISOLATED SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS CANNOT BE RULED OUT. LOCALLY HEAVY RAIN IS POSSIBLE.”