Hey, Rob, I was waiting all day yesterday to hear about the experiences of your relatives in Kearney, Nebraska, including the maternal ancestress, but you never spoke up.
For those not current with the news, Kearney, with 24,000 people the 4th-largest city in Nebraska, was pretty much ravaged by not one, but six, tornadoes Thursday evening.
One suspects that if the 4th-largest city in a blue state had been thusly struck, the news media would've been all over the story like the Bostonian Drunkard over a keg of beer.
Major major major damage, even large motor vehicles tossed hundreds of feet into the air.
Just all sorts of really big damage. Hundreds of millions of dollars.
Incredibly--or perhaps not, Kearney being a red city--there was not a single death.
Even more incredibly, there was not a single injury, not even a splinter stuck in someone's hand.
Really.
Medical personnel had to deal with zero deaths.....zero injuries. Zero splinters.
But of course Kearney being a red city, is not New Orleans. When the funnels started spinning, nobody sat on their front porches waiting for George Bush to fly Air Force One in to take them away.
Hell, nobody's cat or dog or parakeet has even been missing; all accounted for. The goldfish too.
(For those unfamiliar with the geography of Nebraska, Kearney is located in the south-central part of the state, about 50 miles east of where franksolich spent his childhood on the banks of the Platte River; franksolich currently lives about 200 miles to the north, and slightly east, of Kearney.)
The U.S. Weather Service says "four to six" tornadoes struck the city at about the same time, but the videos I saw of the carnage, there are six distinctive funnels. Perhaps the confusion is because the funnels came out of the sky as separate entities, merged together, separated again, merged again, separated again, &c., &c., &c.
This was part of a snake-like storm that followed the course of the Platte River in Nebraska, from just south of North Platte, all the way to Omaha, circa 300 miles east. But once the storm hit the border of Iowa (the Missouri River), it seemed to.....evaporate.
Weather withers once it leaves Nebraska.
There were other funnels in this snake-like form, and winds of more than 80 mph.
Substantial property damage, but no injuries, no deaths, no lost pets, anywhere, for 300 miles.
Nobody sitting around waiting for George Bush to come and take care of them.
The great Platte River, usually only a mile wide and an inch deep, is more than three miles wide in some places; until this morning (Saturday morning) it was damned near impossible to get from northern Nebraska into southern Nebraska, all bridges being down or shut.
I live quite far from the action, although of course the whole entire state of Nebraska had heavy storms Thursday night. Once in a while, I checked outside, to see the William Rivers Pitt, the most prominent landmark here, during the streaks of lightning, still standing strong and defiantly in silhouette against the torrents of rain and hail and wind wishing to erode it away.
Like the Rock of Gibraltar, the William Rivers Pitt stood fast.
Later on yesterday (Friday), I asked a physicist who lives in the area, about the "energy content" of that storm south, alongside the Platte River.
As we all know, ten minutes of a "moderate" storm in the Sandhills of Nebraska produces more electricity than the entire state of New Jersey uses in an entire year.
Okay, I asked, this one further south, that leveled things alongside the Platte River, how much energy did it have?
A thousand Hiroshimas? A hundred thousand Hiroshimas? A million Hiroshimas?
He shook his head, telling me that is like asking how much a 2008 model motor vehicle costs.
Ten bucks? A hundred bucks? A thousand bucks?
That was a whale of a storm your relatives endured, Rob, and I'd like to know how they weathered it.
And for the nocturnally foul one here, who like the sparkling primitive believes man can "destroy" the "planet," well, the nocturnally foul one can shove that idea up his ass and smoke it.
