Tornados!!!

I'm sure many of you have heard by now about the tornado's that went through Kearney Thursday evening. I just happened to be here to experience them! (lucky me!) Mom and Dad had a big drapery job in Hays KS, so I came to Kearney to stay with the kids. (which are only Relyssa & Kaela since Meshayla and Kara are at Preps with Jana, and Morgen went to help Mom & Dad.)

We knew we were supposed to get a bad storm Thursday night, but I never really thought it would be this bad! We were listening to the radio and they were doing a phone broadcast from the west edge of town where one of the DJ's was, and hearing things like "yep, we're seeing some definite rotation in the clouds, it's looking pretty bad out here, oh, looks like a funnel coming out of the clouds, oh wow, there's another funnel that appeared to have just touched down from what we can see....."
Not long after that, the power went out and we sat in the dark, in the closet under the basement stairs and waited and listened and tried to calm a 6 year old who was quite scared, I'm sure we all said a prayer or two, and when the 6 year old wouldn't calm down, we decided to sing some hymns. That did the trick and I think we even managed to get a little giggle out of her when we couldn't remember some of the words to the hymns we've all (all as in Relyssa & I) known for years!
Trey was totally silent through the whole thing, I thought he had fallen asleep! Which of course was good since we were cramped, in the dark and couldn't move enough to get comfortable anyway!
It was so loud even down in our shelter, I was picturing all this terrible damage to the house, roof gone, windows blown out, or something, but when things calmed down and we decided to peek out, the house was still standing minus a few shingles! Grandma Priscilla's house is right next doors to mom & Dad's, and she lost 2 big trees in her front yard and another along her driveway lost a big branch. Mom & Dad lost a good size branch off of their older pear tree, but the rest of the fruit trees look fine.

Ryan stopped by after things were cleared up and was going to go out to survey the damage so I sent my camera with him so I wouldn't be tempted to be one of "those crazy people driving around to look at things"!
Thanks Ryan & Keith T. for the great pictures!
The pictures in my video are some of my own, some of Relyssa's, some of Ryan or Keith's and also some from the Kearney Hub web site.

Here's a few interesting video's on youtube from the tornado...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1vCH4F9AiU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcfbhCA0pBA