Blogtrek

The Tri-City Tornado of 1993

Storm after storm after storm this spring. At least it wasn't as bad as 10 years ago here. On 1993 August 6 an F4 tornado tore through Old Town Petersburg, Virginia and a Wal-Mart in Colonial Heights causing four deaths and property damage so bad that some of it still hasn't been repaired. The strange thing about this for me is that first of all I was not at work but I was on RDO ("regular day off"); for the people at work, it was "not a RDO", which if you rearrange the letters thereof, you get "tornado". Everyone should have taken that Friday off. In fact, I think it would do this country good if everyone would take every Friday off and do what they feel like doing; make every Friday a SUUSI.

The other strange thing is that I had a dream about tornados two nights previous. Here is the text of part of that dream:

I was in a large parking lot. I was with another group of people, but the lot was nearly empty. There was supposed to have been some sort of workshop (or worship?) here. I had heard earlier of some approaching thunderstorms. Then I heard thunder.

I looked up and saw a threatening sky in front of us, quite black. I did not want to go anywhere, however. We were discussing some sort of deal. "We" consisted of me, Anne, and some friends of ours, and a group of people from elsewhere that we had known earlier. I heard you should go inside in case of tornadoes striking. I tried to keep attention but I turned around and I saw two tornadoes coming out of the blackness. They were small in diameter, frizzly, and as black as the clouds. They came right at us. We did not do anything but wait and see where they would go. They side-swiped us to the right, and I could feel the high wind from them even though they did not strike us headon. The tornadoes also went up in the air slightly. After they left, I saw things were apparently OK. But I saw more tornadoes coming.

It startled me when I had that dream, and then the real thing struck two days later. It came close to the church I went to but did not quite hit it. Predictive dream? At that time even ABC was interested in my story, but they rejected it. I suppose it was because I concluded that the dream was caused not by the tornado of August 6 but by the storms of August 2, which caused four power outages at my house.

But still that tornado devastated the community, especially Petersburg (Wal-Mart came out of it OK - they replaced the destroyed store with a Sams and built an even bigger Wal-Mart a mile down the road) and it gave pause to me - some day this could happen to my house, to me. We are not the master of nature.