{"id":37269,"date":"2026-04-24T13:42:05","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T20:42:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=37269"},"modified":"2026-04-24T13:47:36","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T20:47:36","slug":"twister-in-tornado-alley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=37269","title":{"rendered":"Twister in Tornado Alley"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last night&#8217;s tornado in Enid, Oklahoma, which also hit Vance Air Force Base, happily killed no one, though it did destroy dozens of homes in town. Vance AFB was our first USAF assignment, and news of the tornado brought back memories.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"TORNADO STRIKE: 10 Injured, Major Damage at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma | DRM News | AL1C\" width=\"563\" height=\"1000\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/eQhY7tsWg50?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>My pilot training class at Vance AFB started in September 1974. Shortly after arriving Donna and I rented an old farmhouse on the outskirts of Enid. A day or so later the movers showed up with our furniture and stuff from Montana. They finished in the late afternoon, just as storm clouds began to fill the sky. As darkness fell we got in the car with with our 8-year-old son Gregory and drove into town to get dinner at McDonalds. Tornado sirens started going off as our order came up, so we gulped down our burgers and got back in the car to head home. By then it was pitch black with heavy rain and the gutters were beginning to back up. The car radio was reporting a tornado on the ground in Enid, but we didn&#8217;t know the town yet and had no idea how far we might be from it. We made it four blocks before water started coming through the lower door sills. The houses on either side of the street were elevated, so we pulled up someone&#8217;s driveway to wait out the flooding.<\/p>\n<p>A little old lady emerged from the house at the top of the driveway and took us in for the night, a retired schoolteacher named Mrs. Pope. We sat up with her and she fed us breakfast in the morning. By then the storm was gone, and most of the flooding too. We said our thanks and farewells and drove back to our rented house, which had weathered the storm, along with all our stuff, most of it still in boxes. One of the reasons we&#8217;d rented that house was that it had a tornado cellar in the backyard. I opened the door to the storm cellar and it was completely flooded (which is why we never used it in the year or so we lived there). Did I mention that driving home from Mrs. Pope&#8217;s house we saw a boxcar in a tree? Not a sight anyone&#8217;s likely to forget, that.<\/p>\n<p>Many other members of our class, the married ones, had yet to find houses or apartments to rent, so their household goods had been placed in temporary storage on base. The old hangar their stuff was in had its roof ripped off by the tornado and was then flooded. They all lost everything and had to start over &#8230; but then again we were all young and didn&#8217;t have much to begin with.<\/p>\n<p>Apart from that hangar (and the treed boxcar), I don&#8217;t recall a whole lot of damage in town or on the base. I follow Vance AFB&#8217;s Facebook page, where I read that as of this morning there doesn&#8217;t seem to be any damage from last night&#8217;s tornado either; however most base facilities are closed until damage assessment teams finish making their rounds.<\/p>\n<p>I always wondered about the wisdom of placing a pilot training base right in the heart of Tornado Alley, but Vance has been training pilots since the start of WWII and has weathered many a storm, so what do I know?<\/p>\n<p>Some day I&#8217;ll try to recall the more notable hurricanes and typhoons we&#8217;ve lived through in Virginia, Florida, Okinawa, and Hawaii. Some of those were hum-dingers, but as with our welcome-to-Oklahoma tornado in 1974, we always somehow managed to come out the other end whole and happy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last night&#8217;s tornado in Enid, Oklahoma, which also hit Vance Air Force Base, happily killed no one, though it did destroy dozens of homes in town. Vance AFB was our first USAF assignment, and news of the tornado brought back memories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,2],"tags":[4755],"class_list":["post-37269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-personal","tag-twister"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37269"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37278,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37269\/revisions\/37278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}