A high noon tornado watch

I have lived on this plain in north central Ohio for almost seven years. Today is the first time we've really had a tornado warning.

We residents were down in the dining room and some of the meals had already been served. All of a sudden, we were told there was a tornado warning and we had to go up on the hall where it was safer. There are glass windows in the dining rooms.

The sky was looking very menacing as we left. The clouds in the west varied from medium blue, to dark blue, to almost black. I could see from the trees that the wind was blowing and the rain was starting to fall pretty hard.

I think the staff were more upset than the residents. Only a couple of residents became alarmed when they had to leave the dining room so quickly.

We were all told to go to our rooms and I headed that way. But I was cut off and told just to pull over to the side of the hall and wait for the all clear. But they do not realize that in my 21 years in nursing homes I have seen many tornado warnings especially when I lived in southeastern Ohio. One night we spent three or four hours in the hallway stacked together like sardines in a can. The power was out from storms in the second wave, and the third wave of storms was approaching. It was frightfully hot and I felt like I was experiencing claustrophobia. Sometime after that I decided not to leave my private room to go sit in the hallway during a tornado warning. I'm so glad that facility management let me do that. I would just stay on my desktop PC – as long as there was power.

But, today, here I was waiting in the hallway with 40 plus other residents and the staff. We all stood looking at each other. It was kind of strange. A couple of the aides looked kind of fearful. They were probably concerned for family members. I also know one aide went off and left the windows open in her apartment. I knew she would have a mess to clean up later.

Fortunately we were probably only in the hallway ten minutes when the all clear was announced. We headed back to the dining room and I had to eat the food that had been sitting. It wasn't horribly cold but it wasn't warm either. I thought we might be offered a warm-up in the microwave, but we weren't.

After lunch, the town's tornado siren sounded on-and-off for the next two hours. I looked at the radar and there was a wide swath of storms heading west to east.

It's in the evening now and everything is quiet. I'm glad the storms are over for now.