I really don't want to come across here this morning as an angry, insensitive, asshole, but then again this is my blog and with friends and readers asking me to get back to business...
This morning I bring you this from an article on the recent tornadoes here in
Oklahoma…
“Of the 60 EF5 tornadoes since 1950, Oklahoma and Alabama (emphasis mine) have been struck the most, seven times
each. More than half of these top-of-the-scale twisters have occurred in just
five states: Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Fewer than 1 percent of
all U.S. tornadoes are this violent -- only about 10 a year, according to
research meteorologist Harold Brooks at the National Severe Storms Laboratory
in Norman.”
As I’ve been saying out loud and on line here for years …
Having grown up in Alabama in the
1960’s and 1970’s, I’m not that concerned about the weather out here in Oklahoma being that
bad because I’ve lived with it all along in the southeast…
OKLAHOMA just
has the reputation and the media coverage.
And another thing...
The guy that built the house we currently call the "Mid-West Turbo Pup Compound" situated on the banks of the less than "Mighty Arkansas River" was from post WWII Italy.
He built what is now our house during the "Cold War" with the communists in Russia and Eastern Europe.
You know what we have in our basement...a basement blasted out of the slope of solid granite rock when he started his home construction project?
A BOMB SHELTER!
Not a Tornado Shelter...I mean a freaking solid concrete sitting on solid rock with a steel door BOMB SHELTER.
A BOMB SHELTER.............................
It took a while for that to sink in the day I first looked at this house last July.
It's a room which can be accessed off of one of the bedrooms in our basement which has 12" thick concrete filled cinder block (also called CMU's--Concrete Masonry Units) walls, a concrete floor sitting on solid rock, and a 12" thick SOLID CONCRETE ROOF with a vent system which connects with the crawl space under Pat's office upstairs over the area.
We've been told that the room also originally had a "pee trench" which was filled in with concrete back in the late 1980's because it sometimes backed up because our septic tank is undersized for a family of 10 (yes...previous owners of our home had 8 kids and 2 adults in this household.)
So any way...
Today I find myself...while dodging our current Tornadic storms...planning the outfitting this wonderful "safe room" with a new Gun Safe for my soon to be illegal firearms and a reasonable quantity of provisions like some water and other food staples.
The other thing I want to do is replace the commercial steel door which swings "out" with a steel door which swings "in" so that in the event that we actually take a hit from a storm and there is debris outside that door we are not trapped inside as a result.
But any Wayyyyyyyyyyy...
I just think that it's more than a bit retarded how the media coverage of NORMAL SPRING/EARLY SUMMER WEATHER has swooned into the hysterical fits and burps and farts that it is today.
NOTHING HAS CHANGED!
It's just Weather...as it has been for the past zillion years and it will be day in and day out for the next zillion...
no matter what the tree hugging, tie died, kumbaya singing, patchouli stinking hippy Owl Gore following "Global Warming" "Climate Change" zealots tell you
You Know?
Regards Y'all...