Tornado Tales

Saturday was a windy but lovely afternoon. The sun was shining, there wasn't a cloud in the sky. We discovered that there is a turtle family that lives in the pond outside our apartment and watched them sun themselves. We almost didn't believe the evening forecast for severe thunderstorms. That night we watched the lightening storm in the distance from our deck. It was kind of pretty. The lightning never let up for a second so the night sky was constantly bright. We heard that there was a tornado warning but we thought that it was just because of the tornado that had hit Atlanta that morning. The sky above us was clear and we couldn't even hear thunder from the distant storm.
John and I were watching Batman Begins when the power went out at 11:00 that night. Soon we heard the tornado siren alerting the entire city to seek shelter. John and I prepared our laundry room (the innermost and safest room in our apartment) with blankets, extra batteries for our only flashlight, a lighter, candles, powerbars, and a deck of cards. I was kicking myself that we didn't have 72 hour kits or any bottled water. We then waited in the dark for the tornado. There was no power across the whole city, not even the traffic lights were working. (I would just like to mention that this was the day after Savannah's famous St. Patrick's Day Parade, the second largest celebration in the nation, and thousands of drunk people were still celebrating downtown in the dark.)
We were told that a tornado sounds like a freight train driving into your livingroom. Lucky for us we live right beside the train tracks. There were 3 trains while we waited for the tornado. John insisted on waiting on our deck so that we knew when it was coming instead of sitting in our laundry room not knowing what was going on. Every time we heard the train we ran into our laundry room until we decided that it wasn't a tornado. It was kind of scary at the time, but looking back it's actually quite comical. At midnight we were really starting to get tired but we were afraid to go to sleep in our bed since our room is on an outside wall, we have a window, and we're on the third floor. Three no-no's for tornados. We decided to sleep in our laundry room until 1am when the tornado was supposed to have passed.
Well no tornado ever came to our corner of Savannah but one did touch down about 45 minutes away in Rincon, GA. It took out 13 electrical towers, which is why we and 150,000 others lost power, and a few mobile homes. We were awoken the next morning at 9am to our lights turning on after the power outage. We were grateful that we were preserved but a little disappointed that we didn't have a better story to tell. Maybe next time we'll just make it up and no one will know the difference.