On Dec 30, 4:52*pm, Frank Reid © 2008 wrote:
I was raising parakeets for sell to pet stores when I was a teenager.
Heard the Santa Ana's were coming in, I pulled all the birds inside in
a temp cage (60 plus birds). *The outside cage, 10'X12' by 8' high got
picked up by a gust, thrown over a 6' fence and landed in my driveway
out front, crushed. *Thing never touched the fence. *Had a "fire sale"
on budgies.
Frank Reid

WHAT??!!

No crushed Frank?.....no lacerated Frank?.....no mangled Frank?.....no
broken Frank?.....no bleeding Frank?.....no tossed, dragged, upended,
splayed, skewered, pummeled, bruised, blistered, burned, impaled,
knouted, clubbed, abraded, whipped, drowned, dunked, denuded,
disarticulated, flayed, fried or fibrulated Frank? Nothing more than
a discommoded, disgruntled and mildly dismayed Frank?!

Well, ****, even *I* can beat that......sorta.

While in Key West, long about '72 or thereabouts to pick up movies
(back in the days of actual movie projectors, I was volunteered to be
the MPO {Movie Projector Operator} while at home on leave from duty on
the USCGC Androscoggin), I was walking down the street and lo and
behold, there were five......FIVE!.....waterspouts (that's aquatic
tornadoes, for you landlubbers) traveling in a line.....nicely spaced
at a few hundred yards apart.....about a mile offshore. My mandible
hit the pavement not just once, on seeing the waterspouts, but a
second time when it became evident that no one else on the busy
thoroughfare paid them the slightest heed. Must be a common sight
there......or maybe one of us, or a lot of us, had recently scored
some very good or very bad drugs.

In June of '84, the tornado that ate Barneveld missed me and my
bicycle by about 24 hours......I was obviously too fast for it.

In August of '92, the tornado that ate Wautoma missed me and my car by
about a minute and a half, and/or a hundred yards.....it can be
confoundedly difficult to sort these things out sometimes. I had seen
bad weather approaching while enjoying a late supper at Hardees and
decided to try to beat it out of town. Half a mile later I pulled off
onto the shoulder because of high winds, pelting rain, and zero
visibility. Of course, I didn't know at the time that there was a
tornado.....thus explaining how my breeches managed to remain
unsoiled. I didn't find out until an hour or so later when I called a
friend to tell him about my day of fishing on the west branch of the
White River, which flows through the outskirts (such as they
are.....or were, then) of Wautoma. He said, did you see the
tornado?

Huh?

I went back the next morning.

Ouch!

If memory serves, it took the better part of a year before the
detritus in and along the stream was entirely cleared up. Broken off
stumps of trees are still visible here and there to this day.

So, in retrospect, I guess maybe I have experienced winds in excess of
75 knots while on land.......just didn't know it at the time.

giles
who surveyed the damage left by the Kenosha county tornado about a
year ago.....but was nowhere within thirty miles when the damage was
done. go figure.