I moved from North West Indiana to North Central Indiana three years ago. I had seen some bad storms, but never in my life had I seen a tornado, nor did I think that I ever would see one and especially not up close and personal. We get some really bad storms where I live now in which is out in the country, surrounded by corn fields. We had a tractor pull scheduled for June 5th 2005 in North West Indiana (Westville, Indiana).
We went to the tractor pull not expecting severe thunderstorms to roll through, when all the sudden the wind picks up and it downpours, horizontal rain. A police officer heard that there was a tornado sighted just west of there and he had family at the tractor pull so he stopped at the park and told everyone that there was a tornado spotted just west of there and told us that we should cancel the pull and head home.
We did just that… On the way back home to North Central Indiana , we come through Plymouth Indiana onto US 30 and US 31 at the overpass and were driving into a really nasty looking storm. The wind picked up and it started to rain, again, horizontal rains 80 mph winds and to the right we noticed a huge wide dark cloud on the right side of the road, it was a tornado.
Two minutes further down the road there was another one, as soon as we crossed the over pass we were watching out the rear view mirror where the tornado had crossed the road behind us. We get down the road a little further and there was a truck driver on the CB radio saying that there was a tornado on the ground and soon as we seen the truck driver pass us going to opposite direction, we seen the third tornado and it was a rope tornado in which was traveling down the side of the road not more than 300 feet away.
A few minutes down the road the road there were people pulled over to the side of the road and a few people standing outside of their car looking at something on the other side of the road. My husband wanted to see what they were looking at, just out of curiosity as if what we had gone through wasn’t enough already. He pulls over and rolls the window down, it was raining really hard, and he sees a huge rope tornado coming right towards the road like it was going to cross the road but it was still up the road a ways so we hit the gas and tried to get out of its path as quickly as possible.
I happened to look over to the other side of the road and could not believe my eyes when I seen another rope tornado coming towards the road as if it was also going to cross the road so we start moving faster, again to get out of the path of not just one but two tornadoes in which were both crossing the road and going from one side to the other side of the road and we were right in between both tornadoes but we made it out safely. That was the first time that I had ever seen a tornado, let alone more than one tornado all in the same storm cell. I didn’t take my camera that day and we didn’t think that we were going to run into something like that and storms were not even being predicted for that day but it was so hot that day that it didn’t surprise me that it stormed. I wish that I would have had my camera that day because those pictures would have been awesome!
The above picture was taken in my back yard, almost over my house. I was standing beneath this tornado when I had taken these pictures. This Picture was taken June 27th 2007 in Akron, Indiana.
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