Happy Cinco De Mayo! I went to the gym this morning. On the elliptical machine, I tried watching re-runs of America’s Next Top Model. But I kept flipping back to CNN and MSNBC. I couldn’t take my eyes off the overnight Tornado videos out of Oklahoma.
Another one destroyed a Kansas town near Wichita last night. News stations report 7 people were killed when the tornado blew thru Greensburg. And about an hour ago, CNN bumped up that number to 9 people.
Right now, I’m worried about the stormy weather messing with Mark’s flight into MCI later this evening. I’m also praying for the families who lost loved ones in this latest twister. However, I’m not freaked out about the safety of my puppy and myself. After living in Kansas for more than a year, tornadoes are simply another weather system to observe, report and stay out of the way. As a native California, it’s kinda like growing up with earthquakes.
Earlier this week, I shrunk a tornado down to the size of my fingernail…probably smaller.
On May Day, the newsroom went into severe weather mode. We had people chasing tornadoes and our meteorologists went wall-to-wall coverage…following storms in our viewing area. We aired lived video of funnel clouds forming, from out in the field and in on our sky cams. It was crazy, exhilarating and I left like I was running a marathon.
Then Fally told me we should offer up the tornado video to the network. So she exported the video and I grabbed it off the server. It took me about 15 minutes to send over a couple hundred megabytes of video to Chicago. This tornado was quite big and it could rip up a lot of land and property. But thanks to our computers we could export that funnel cloud to any part of the country.
And later that evening, one of our storm chases said he saw our tornado video on the Weather Channel.
Technology is cool.