Amy (and everyone else) - just heard from Dawn and she's okay! She's close to her cellar but the worst of the weather was on the other side of I-35 from her.

We may spend Mother's Day building a boat. I swear I see fish jumping in our new pond formerly known as our front acre.

Thanks, y'all. I was monitoring storm spotter traffic on my fire radio and never actually went into the cellar because I knew where it was and where it was headed.

We only get pitiful tiny tornadoes here 99.9% of the time and I am not complaining. After they scare us, they go on and hit another county and then we feel bad for them.

This storm has three counties to our E/NE tornado warned right now, so y'all watch out for in in Marshall, Bryan and Johnson counties.

The weather radar looks bad! My relatives on the East Coast are worried for us.

George

We only received 2 inches today. All of the bad weather stayed south, sorry Dawn. The storms are brewing down by Lawton again so the rain may not be over. Everybody stay safe and dry.

Oh. Good. Grief. It's pouring heavy again here in NE Norman. Seriously. I'm so over this ........

Praying those south of me aren't floating way!

How many gallons of water in 100 acres 3 ft deep. That is what I have.

Paula, Again???? You know, some people move to a nice little retirement house on the lake when they retire. You and Ken won't have to do that because the lake is coming to you.

Scott, That is a whole lot more math than I am going to attempt on a Saturday night after being awake most of the last few nights because of raging thunderstorms. You'd have to convert it to acre feet and figure out how many gallons per acre foot times 100 acres times 3 is my best guess. You can do the math if you want, and I'll link an acre-foot conversion page, or we can just guess and say you have a billion gallons.

How long can the pecan trees tolerate standing in a billion gallons of water?

Dawn

Math Conversion Formula For Acre Feet

Believe it or not some of our trees stood in water for 3 months back in 2007 or so. They didn't die. The downstream river is well below floodstage so all water should clear by Tuesday unless we get more tomorrow.

I have enough floodwater on my property to raise Lake Hefner by an inch all by myself. This how my soil depth got to 15+ feet over the centuries.

All ponds overflowing first time since 2011

Same here on overflowing ponds and what is so unique about that is that my ponds have been empty long enough that forests have sprouted in them and we really stopped thinking of them as ponds. I think the spring feeding the pond and the spring feeding the swamp both dried up in the drought of 2005-06, although we weren't positive the springs weren't going to start running again until after the drought of 2007-09. In 2009 the big pond held water from April through late June, but then dried up in July or early August. I expect the same will happen this year.

I know there are pecan orchards in bottom land (that likely is flooded right now based on our flood warnings) to our west and northwest along the river that have been there many decades and have had to sit in water for at least as long as yours did in 1997. It is my understanding that 1990 was even worse---that was the year the Red River got so high that the water was touching the bottom of the pavement of the Red River bridge. Astonishingly, they didn't close the bridge, and local residents have described to us just how frightening it was to drive over that bridge to go to work on the Texas side when you could feel the water flowing beneath your feet, so to speak. Nowadays, they'd likely close the bridge if the water got that high. There's been tons of big sandbars east of the Red River bridge for years and years that have remained mostly above water and there's trees growing on those sand bars. Even when the water rises over the sand bars, the trees stick up out of the water. Yesterday, those trees were about 2/3s under water and it wouldn't surprise me if the river rises over the tops of those trees later this week.

We had another very large, noisy storm last night. Actual rainfall was only an inch or two. But there was wind. At 2:00 AM a large limb from a tree, close to our chicken coop came crashing down. I had to go out to check on things and decided to pull some of the broken limbs away from the fence, as it had come down partially over our pasture fence. Come day light, we might have had goats in our back yard, eating our fruit trees!

So, I moved those branches, checked the fence and went back to bed. There was very little damage, other than to my arm...where my wife grabbed me and shook me awake.

Happy Mother's Day everyone. Paula , I am so sorry. I know it is raining again today. Dawn, glad you were safe. I kind of freaked out when I saw the tornado warning down there. Scott, I hope your land drain's soon. George, you made me smile. You have a better attitude than I would have under the same circumstances. Everyone stay safe again today!

George, You are a very sound sleeper! We had a good-sized tree snap entirely in half about 5' above ground during this morning's storm, so Tim and I will spend part of tomorrow cutting down that tree and cleaning up the mess.

Amy, I thought I did a fairly good job of not freaking out because I was watching it on radar and listening to the local storm spotters long before we were tornado-warned, so I knew where it was and which way it was moving. I knew we were not in its path if it continued on in the same direction without making a strange curve or twist to the west or northwest. I still went and opened the tornado shelter and stood by the open door under relatively light and bright cloudy skies and watched the tremendously dark storm move along to our east. I could have hopped right in and slammed the door if something started coming our way.

This morning's fierce storm was 100 times more scary here at our house than yesterday's tornado.

The Red River is up high and running swift and it looks ugly. The trees on the river sandbars that still had their heads above water yesterday are completely submerged this morning. In dry years, folks camp on those sandbars, sometimes for a week at a time, treating the sandbars like a little private island. Well, no one is going to be camping on them now, unless they are in a submarine.

I'm hoping this morning's wicked line of storms used up a lot of the potential energy and maybe gives us a quieter day than forecast. Do I think that is likely? Probably not, but it is what I'm hoping for anyway.

I need to go look at today's Convective Outlook to see what it says, but I don't want to. I'm afraid it all will be bad news for us. I prefer to live in denial.

Dawn

Well today's round one has just passed my house. I can still hear the thunder as it moves off to the east, but except for rain it was not a big event here. Of course, the day isn't over and I understand there is more to come.