By the time the tornado siren sounded one week ago, the roof of Sydney Moore’s mobile home in Clarksville, Tennessee, had been sheared off and her 4-month-old son Lord sucked up by the twister.
“There was no warning,” said Moore, 22, who immediately moved to shield her 1-year-old son, Princeton, with her body.
Moore’s boyfriend, Aramis Youngblood, 39, rushed to protect Lord, who was sleeping in a bassinet swept up in a swirl of wind and debris Saturday evening as a series of powerful tornadoes and storms tore through the state.
My friend is an amateur storm watcher and loves this stuff. The way he explained it is tornadoes are notoriously hard to predict and track. You can have widespread areas under tornado warnings (i.e., “all the ingredients are ripe for a tornado to form somewhere”) but beyond that it’s difficult to immediately report the formation of a funnel, its heading and speed, etc.
These storm watchers actually help quite a bit in providing real-time information when feasible.
Im an avid weather watcher, and there was plenty of warning for people who are even slightly weather aware. The problem is, most people are not weather aware in the slightest. It was well known that there was going to be a severe weather outbreak with the possibility of dangerous tornados a day or two before the event. Hell, even growing up in the Midwest it is common to just ignore the tornado sirens because you’ve heard them a million times. Not sure if that’s what happened here.