Another warm day, Lyn went off to the craft meeting this morning and I did a few odd jobs around the place. The forecast was for rain to develop in the afternoon with the possibility of thunderstorms. Given the forecast we decided to stay in the trailer rather than to go exploring.
What seemed a little unusual to us was that most people were going round their sites putting away flags, ornaments etc. and also putting in their awnings.
Looking on the radar I could see a line of thunderstorms approaching that looked quite vicious, but they also looked as though they may slide by us (as they usually do!), shortly after this we heard on the radio that there was a tornado watch in effect together with a severe thunderstorm warning!
The rain started, quite gently, and we noticed a few people going to the clubhouse, nothing unusual as there are often activities going on down there; then more and more people headed down, this time with pets. Now that is unusual as pets are not allowed in the clubhouse. The sky got darker, the rain got heavier and the thunder got closer, given the amount of lightning building up around us, I made a quick dive outside to disconnect the hydro. More people headed down to the clubhouse and we finally put two and two together and decided that they were heading to a more secure location, maybe this event was a little more serious than we gave it credit for.
By now it was very dark out, there was abundant thunder and lightning, the wind was howling and the rain lashing down, no way were we leaving the trailer now. Another check with the weather site, and the tornado watch had been upgraded to a warning for our area!
Looking on the weather radar I could see the storm cells as the weather people here very nicely number them, give details about them and put arrows on them to show their direction. The weather outside hadn’t changed much, the amount of water coming down was quiet amazing The radar now showed a purple triangle which is a tornado, it was about 15 miles from us and on a heading to remain clear. The really heavy weather lasted about 20 minutes, the tornado stayed away from us then the rain started to ease up. As the rain decreased, people started emerging from the clubhouse, the radar showed that the line of storms had now passed and there was just moderate rain behind it, in fact it’s still raining about 7 hours later.
I am not sure if the people going to the clubhouse were over reacting or whether we were wrong for not joining them, I suspect it was a touch of both. Interesting afternoon though!