Tornados: tell us stories about your up close encounters

When I was about 5 years old my family got caught in a big one in our car.
We were trying to make it to our church, where there was a basement.
It destroyed our car, a 65 Thunderbird, but none of us were seriously hurt. I don't remember much about that one.
I drove through a small one in 1988, I got lucky and just ran my car into the ditch, minor damage to my car.
Another small one came through a construction site I was working at, around 1993. We were able to get in a safe place and nobody got hurt. It made a mess of the job site though. Materials were scattered all over the place.
Then about 7 years ago I was coming back from delivering to some place in Florida in my truck. I knew the weather was perfect for a tornado that day, I could feel it.
Just as I was coming into the town of Luverne, Al. It got dark suddenly and the trees started twisting. I just stopped my truck right there in the road. I had an empty trailer and I thought I was a goner. Nothing I could do.
Power poles started snapping off right in front of me and all kinds of metal and debris were blowing across the road just maybe 75 yards ahead of me.
It lasted maybe 10 or 15 seconds and did a bit of damage to the town, but I don't think anyone was seriously hurt.
It was terrifying, but no damage to me or my truck, except the drivers side of the tractor and trailer were plastered with mud.
I grew up close to Madison, Al. and tornados are a fact of life there.
There's a lot of farmland in that area and you can see for long distances.
I've watched many tornados from a distance. Some of them very bad.
I remember watching a huge one in 1974, you could see the debris in the sky around it and you knew people were getting killed.

Edit: That last one at Luverne was 9 years ago. April 2017.

One morning in 2016, I woke up to hear what sounded like a shotgun firing. I went outside to see what it was and two large pine trees had fallen onto the powerline and dropped the line across the driveway entrance. Turns out a tornado had gone right down the street. If either of those pine trees had fallen the other direction, it would've been a direct hit on my bedroom with me still passed out.

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Damn. Sounds like you're the Jim Cantore of tornadoes.

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I'm lucky, none of the ones I was actually in were'nt anything but small ones. They were scary enough.
The one in 88 was at night and was a total surprise. It didn't last long, it took down a couple of barns and damaged some roofs, but probably stayed down for less than a mile.
The one in 93 was like that too, but it was daytime and we saw it coming across the cottonfield.
We were building the Huntsville super walmart west of town on 72.

A very small one (confirmed tornado, not a microburst) came down the street at the south end of my block in summer 2024. Luckily, my family and I were out at the lake that week so I didn’t experience it first hand.

Fortunately, it didn’t cause much direct damage to houses, but it fricked up plenty of trees. It took down the top half of the large sugar maple in my backyard, which shocking fell right in between my house and my neighbors. Messed up a section of my fence, but no damage to the house. The tree is a shell of its former self now; the canopy looks like a donut.

Some neighbors across the street weren’t so lucky. They had a tree fall on their brand new, two-story garage and completely destroyed it.

Man you guys sure are magnets for tornadoes

Drove under an underpass near Pell City Alabama in the 90s and parked when a friend and I were pelted by an ungodly amount of wind and hail. When we got to Birmingham from Georgia we found that a tornado ripped through there as we were nearby.

One other time on April 27, 2011, the day of the big Tuscaloosa tornado, an F2 eased past our subdivision at 5:30 in the morning, blew out my dormer windows, uprooted a tree onto my house, and knocked down trees and ruined roofing for many homeowners. It sounded like machine guns pelting my house with bullets and the tree came through the upper master bath ceiling with a loud crash as we ran down the stairwell to the basement.
It was a wake up call for us all!

Saw one form right above me, and it later touched down a few miles away. The crazy bubbling cloud & green tint was something out of Minas Morgul from LotR.

2nd one passed less than a mile away, barely a level 1 and shrouded in clouds and rain. Still looked cool.

I was in the 6th grade and my parents had a boat marina on the Halifax River just outside Daytona. It was summer and my job was to roll up the windows in cars if a thunder storm came up. The blackest cloud I've ever seen sat down across the river coming towards the marina. A water spout started tearing up the covered outer docks sending sheet metal twisting and flying.

I crawled under a car near the water. I saw a piece of sheet metal go over the head of a college kid who was working for the summer. He was cleaning fish for a couple of women when it hit. He pushed the women into the shallow water and jumped just as a big piece of sheet metal went over his head.




Sheet metal was dropped a mile and a half away. One piece was stuck half way through a hard creosoted piling.


Big one just hit Enid Ok where I lived for a year when I was in HS. Father worked at Vance.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/amy-curtis/2026/04/24/enid-tornado-n2675000

It is tornado season...