Rolla, Missouri 2025 Tornado
We were never in Kansas…someone should tell the weather.
Last summer, I moved to the small(ish) town of Rolla, Missouri. I say smallish because compared to where I grew up, it seems huge, but compared with actual cities, it’s tiny. Because there’s a university here, there are amenities not offered in towns with similar populations. We have a bowling alley, two hospitals, a movie theater, a water park, several arcades, and a handful of full-sized grocery stores to choose from.
Overall, it’s a pleasant little town to live in, until tornado season.
Starting in April, the region is beset upon by strong winds, low pressure fronts, and frequent thunderstorms. This weather soup is the perfect recipe for twisters.
Last year, my husband forged ahead to the Midwest while my son and I stayed in Portland, Oregon to finish out the school year. Right on cue, Rolla got its first tornado warning on April 1st. Over the course of the month, the town received four warnings, usually hitting between the hours of 11 pm and 4 am. None of these warning resulted in tornadoes, luckily.
Before embarking on our journey east, my husband and I decided that since we were moving to tornado country, we should at the very least see what we were getting ourselves into. We researched historic tornado maps of the area and happily discovered that a tornado hadn’t hit Rolla in the last 80 years.
Secure in knowing that weather data and everyone we spoke with that tornadoes aren’t really a worry in the area, we bought a house and settled into small town life.
Typical for spring, an alert was sent out for a severe thunderstorm on Friday, March 14. Winds of 60 mph were expected with softball sized hail and torrential downpours. We made sure all the doors and window were locked. Anything that could blow away was brought inside or secured in the yard. We were stocked with candles and all of our flashlight had batteries.
Strong winds battered the town all day, making it hard to drive, much less be outdoors. Then around seven, black, ominous clouds poured across the sky. We all waited for the rain and lightning to begin, but nothing came. The wind got louder and shook the house, then, shortly after 8 in the evening, our emergency radio went off, tell us to take shelter. Next, the tornado siren nearby began blaring.
With tornadoes, the usual advice is to take shelter in an interior room, preferably a bathroom inside the tub, if possible, covering yourself with pillows. The pipes help tether the heavy tub to the building and give you a place to hunker in case the roof gets ripped off your home. The big misconception about tornadoes is that people will get sucked up into them. However, these occurrences, once a rarity, are becoming a genuine threat.
Extreme weather is driving more F5 tornadoes with wind speeds peaking over 300 mph and vortexes over a mile wide across the country. These mega storms can level whole towns, killing most anything in their paths. Yet, the largest problem with tornadoes remains flying debris.
Since there are four of us, too many for a single bathtub, we took shelter in the hallway, well away from windows. As the alarms sounded, the rain started. Wind whipped hail against the windows with a force I was sure would shatter them. Then the lights flickered, went off for a moment, popped back on, flickered again, and went out for good. A few minutes later, the wind died down, the sirens quieted, leaving us to listen to the rain pound against the roof.
The Aftermath
A few people on the street had solar powered yard lights. Their batteries charged from the sunny day, popped on, cutting through the pitch of the streets. Fallen tree limbs littered our quiet cul-de-sac. The wind still whipping the winter-bare branches that had remained attached to their trunks.
The next morning, the sky was clear. The sodden ground squelched muddy water up around the soles of our shoes. We lost a few branches from our short-leaf pine in the yard, and the power was still off. Other than that, we had survived the storm unscathed. The town was another matter.
We ventured out the find ice and an ice chest and, to our dismay and awe, found the town in tatters. A little over a 100 yards from our front porch, an EF2 tornado had roared through Lion’s Club Park, downing trees like children’s building blocks. Some were ripped clear from the ground, their roots thick with mud.
A shopping center farther down Bishop Avenue (Highway 63) was leveled. The strong winds crushing the plate-glass windows, sweeping away the contents, leaving nothing by a mangled pile of debris behind. All along the street, power poles were snapped like toothpicks, leaving a third of the city without power.
The Tornado’s Path
The tornado cut a path diagonally through town. It hopped over a couple of blocks on Highway 72 to set down again, hitting several schools, plunging trees into homes, and ripping roofs off older buildings. One school near our house was so badly damaged, it will be closed for the rest of the school year.
The storm system that dropped a relatively small twister on our town deposited 19 tornadoes across the state of Missouri, killing 12 people. The same system plagued the Midwest to the Eastern seaboard from March 13 to the 16, causing around 116 tornadoes, leaving 30 dead across eight states.
The Destruction
As I sit here writing, we are again under a tornado watch. The weather is warm and stormy with high winds. Hopefully, if any touchdown, it is in unpopulated areas. I, for one, am done with tornadoes, but the season is just kicking off.
