Oklahoma

Sometimes it's hard to visualize what a natural disaster looks like.  We hear news reports and see video, but the immensity of it all can somehow fail to register.  In many ways, one has to experience the forces of the environment to have any concept of what it might feel like.

In California we have earthquakes.  It's funny, but when you talk to people from other states, they sound terrified of earthquakes.  The thought of the ground suddenly rumbling and pitching back and forth frightens them to no end.  For us, even though severe earthquakes are horrible disasters, the minor ones mention barely a peep on the news.  It's just common here.

Oklahoma City was just pummeled with another tornado, this one a force 5 monster.  Many of us have seen the videos; the time-lapse video taken from a news copter, the phone video taken outside a KFC, and others.  We hear the stories of storm cellar doors being ripped from their hinges and glass and debris pouring down on those within.  And yet, those of us here in California might not be able to fathom the sheer terror of such a catastrophe.  We hear descriptions, of course, of how the noise sounds like a freight train bearing down on a person, or how the destruction was such that it was like a vacuum cleaner sucking up everything in a two mile wide berth.  The photos and other images are heart-breaking, but those of us who have never (and hope to never) experience one cannot even begin to understand what it must be like.  People in other states may be afraid of earthquakes, but the idea of a tornado like the ones that struck this week blow my mind.  I can't imagine what it must feel like, especially at night, when the world literally turns upside down.  I cannot begin to sense what the folks must feel who see their entire neighborhood simply vanished and transformed into rubble.

I can, however, hope that everyone is okay.  I can pray for those who share my faith, and those who don't, to survive and recover their lives.  People send donations of food, water, clothing and money through a variety of sources, hopefully honest ones.

And then, the people of Moore will rebuild.  Again.  Check the history books, and you'll see that this isn't the first time the people of Oklahoma City have experienced a tornado like this.  This one followed a similar path to one that hit in 1999.  Fourteen years, and they get hit again.

Earthquakes scare you?  Me?  I'd move the heck out of Oklahoma.  But then, to them, these may be like earthquakes to us.  A scary, but not unknown, result of a combination of natural forces and human climactic impact that can pile cars like toys.  I'll keep California, thanks.