This Tornado Warning has been extended through 9:30 p.m. and a portion of Seminole County (including the Francis areas) has been added.

The Tornado Watch issued earlier remains in effect through midnight.

Here is a link that might be useful: Text of Extended Warning

The Tornado Warning has expired and the storm has weakened.

Hope everyone made it through the storms alright.

We took DGD out fishing at Lake Thunderbird tonite and we watched the storms building. As we came home at dark, we even saw lightning. I KNEW something was up!

Thanks for the confirmation! Dawn - you're better than any of our local weatherforecasters!

Paula,

I hope y'all had fun at the lake!

These storms popped up out of nowhere sometime after 6 p.m. I noticed them while feeding the animals, putting them up for the night, etc. I wasn't worried about them, per se, because they were north of us and we had no watches and warning (but I didn't have a radio with me, so I knew we might have a watch or warning I didn't know about) . I came inside shortly after 7 o'clock and clicked on the local TV channel and the NWS webpage at the same time....just as the Tornado Watch was issued and then one minute later the first warning was issued, and after that it was just insane here.

Our local CBS affiliate, KXII-TV, has excellent meteorologists and also a storm spotter, Doug Drace, who they work with and they go with wall-to-wall coverage when tornadoes are occurring. As usual, Doug was right in the middle of it all tonight giving us great reports, and I just tried to relay it back.

I was worried the storms wouldn't dissipate quickly enough and might make it far enough east to be a threat to some of our forum members. It is funny...I went outside and could see the storms from the south and you were outside and could see them from the north...and look how far apart we were!

I haven't heard if there are any damage reports. The storm spotter reports of funnel cloud touchdowns were in largely rural areas, so maybe nobody's home took a direct hit.

Now, the dryline will move back west again, so this potentially could happen somewhere in OK again tomorrow.

Dawn

Dawn,

I'm probably the only person in northwest Oklahoma that posts or reads this forum, but if you see one out here don't forget about me. Ive been outside most of the evenings and chances are I won't see the the post til after midnight or a day later but you never know.

A couple of years ago a tornado took out a farm house and the couple who lived there not far from here, I think around the shattuck or beaver area. That really stirred up my memories of childhood trauma that my mom caused as she had a police scanner and was always glued to it during storm season and screaming get in the bathtub or we've got to get to a cellar!! Around the same year we had a big tornado go about 10 miles south of town and take out a couple of houses, one couple was trapped in a caved in basement for several hours. They are now my neighbors as they decided to move to town rather than rebuild On their land.

Sheri,

We have Jay up in Elkhart, KS, and Jan is there in one of the panhandle counties, but there's not a lot of other forum members in your area as far as I know.

I always post watches and warnings if I am home and see them. Sometimes, though, I'm out in the yard and don't realize severe weather is occurring elsewhere. I saw yesterday's supercells popping up around 6 or 6:30 p.m. in the sky north of us, so finally came inside to check the NWS website and saw the Tornado Watch and Warning pop up. After that, it was crazy here....the local stations had wall-to-wall coverage as numerous small funnels appeared in the air briefly and then finally the larger wedge tornado was on the ground. It is my understanding there was damage in Center, OK, which I think is in Pontotoc County. Down here in southcentral OK we don't get a lot of local news on the weekend, so it likely will be a couple more days before we hear how much damage occurred in Pontotoc County.

Sometimes I can't post watches or warnings because severe storms here always knock out our internet service. I don't know why. We joke that if one raindrop falls we lose internet service for hours, but it isn't funny when you're trying to watch for severe weather.

We had a very small, weak tornado cross the Red River close to our house last September. Our son was one of the spotters out tracking it as it came across the river and hopscotched its way across the county. I think it mostly stayed in the air and only damaged a rural barn or two in a very minor way. At our house, as the tornado was crossing the river, we had tremendous rain. Seems like we had a couple of inches in about 15 to 20 minutes. When I came out of the tornado shelter, our entire yard had been transformed into a lake in mere minutes. While the entire county received some rain, only a very small area near where the tornado crossed the river had the brief, really heavy rainfall. At that point we really needed the rain too after a hot, dry summer.

A few weeks ago, spotters along the Love County-Carter County line spotted a funnel cloud. We were listening to them on our fire radios and since it was folks we know, we could hear the stress levels rising in their voices, as the tornado sirens sounded in their area. That funnel didn't touch down on the ground there but was in the storm cell that shortly thereafter hit Tushka with what I believe was an F-3 tornado. We watch the skies pretty carefully around here. We often have little funnels pop up in the skies, but they seldom touch down here, for which I'm grateful.

Since my husband and son are volunteer firefighters, when there's a tornado warning, I'm usually in the cellar alone, and they are out there storm spotting. (sigh)

One year we had a rotating supercell right over our neighborhood and another fire chief from the neighboring department came to sit in our driveway with Tim and watch the rotation. Tim was on the radio with our Emergency Management Director who in turn was on the phone with someone from the NWS. The NWS person told our EM Director that the rotation over us would not touch down in our county, and it didn't, but that storm moved NE and a tornado from it did touch down an hour or two after it left our county. I was in the tornado shelter the whole time just in case "they" were wrong. We did get heavy rainfall and flashflooding from that storm, but no hail or tornadoes.

The only year I didn't really watch the weather closely was our first year here---1999. We worked outside all day and went to bed early on May 3rd, so we didn't watch the evening news and didn't even know tornadoes were occurring in the OKC area until our friends from Texas starting calling late that night to see if we were alright. We were fine and basically said "Tornado? What tornado? Oklahoma's having tornadoes tonight?" Here at our house it was clear and quiet. We bought a NOAA weather radio and put in the tornado shelter shortly thereafter.

Dawn

If you click on the link below, it will take you to a tornado video on the website of The Weather Channel. The video was shot last night during the Ada area tornado.

Here is a link that might be useful: Oklahoma Funnel Cloud from Ada, OK

Yeah, I'm terrified of tornados too. Everytime I let my guard down and ignore storm warnings something always happens that me back in my place. Let me tell you this story real fast before I'm off to sleep, guess where I was during the horrific tornados that devastated Wichita KS and it's southern suburbs in the spring of 1991? Yep right in the middle of those storms. I had moved up with my dad and was going school there, on my way home I heard siren and ignored it just like my dad told me too "ignore it, they set those off all the time here". Wasnt long til they broke in on the radio said the biggie, over a mile wide was ripping through neighborhoods south of my dads, and predicted to hit at the intersection where we lived. I was not far from there and headed back to the other side of town-incase you didn't hear much about it- there upwards of 50 tornados said to have occurred that day-nOt so sure they all touched down-but every turn I would make it seemed like they would report one in my path. I was just a kiddo then and it was so scary!

I remember the okc tornado your talking about too. I remember hearing the stories about ppl drivIng in the downtown area and actually turning corners around the tall buildings into the tornado because they had no idea it was there-all they could see was blowing debris and it just looked like high winds. That story has always terrified me. Sounds like your prObably having more occurences than we are though. Now....next time there's flood talk-I'll tell you another story-and it will make you laugh for sure. Gn, sheri

Sheri,

My brother was a student at Midwestern State in 1979 when the deadly tornado hit Wichita Falls. He was on a baseball scholarship, they had a doubleheader scheduled that day and should have been playing on the ball field....which was one of the early places the tornado touched down. That morning, the coach at the other college, had checked the weather, saw it looked stormy in WF and called and suggested they move the games to Abilene, so they did. That may have saved the lives of the two college baseball teams and their fans.

When we went to his college graduation a whole year later, the rusting hulks of cars stay lay in highway medians and such. This was back before FEMA and back before the federal government did a lot to help you clean up and recover. I remember that on the side of Wichita Falls that was affected, there still weren't any street lights so we had to 'get out of town' before dark, or it would have been hard to see the roadways. That was 14 months later and made quite an impression on me.

My dad survived two tornadoes...one that picked up their house and set it down about 50 yards away when he was a kid pretty close to where we live now, and one as an adult. He and his carpool buddy were driving home from work and saw a tornado approaching. They got out of the car and laid down in the bar ditch beside the road. The tornado crossed the road ahead of them, then they got back into the car and drove home. He was as calm as could be when he got home, but we were shaken because we could see the stormy black skies between us and his employer and knew there was a tornado out there somewhere. This was long before cell phones (I think it was the mid-70s) so we didn't know if he was alright until his car pulled into the driveway.

A few years later a tornado came close but missed my parents house. Softball-sized hail put holes through not only their exterior walls and roof, but the interior walls and ceiling, and of course the windows were knocked out and cars totaled. My parents got practically a whole new house out of that because they had to rebuild the walls and ceilings starting from the original framing. New insulation, new carpet, new flooring, new windows and window treatments, walls, roof, etc.

I remember taking my little sister, who was a teenager then, back to my apartment to sleep that weekend because her bed was buried under glass, wallboard, insulation, etc. and soaking wet. I'd never seen anything like it. You could stand outside and put your arm and hand through the 'hail holes' into the inside of the house. Needless to say, my dad's garden was destroyed that year. Of course, he replanted and had plenty of tomatoes. There isn't much that survives softball-sized hail.

I want to hear about your flood experience!