Anybody got that tornado’s email address? I’d like to congratulate him (or her) on an excellent taste in coffee and architecture.
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That’s what I keep saying, but all I get is “Sir, please pull your pants up and get out.”
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But what will save you from the cultural vortex that is Texas?
(I kid, I’m from Kentucky. Even you guys get more respect than we do. Someone honestly asked me if people in Kentucky wear shoes.)
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The shoe thing actually has an interesting history. After the civil war, doctors from the north noticed an awful lot of southerners were clinically lethargic. Turned out that open pit toilets breed hookworms and a lot of people in the south were severely anemic. Pretty much completely reversed that with outhouses, plumbing and shoes. Since hookworms can move a meter a day, and a lot of people walked around barefoot because it’s so hot.
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This Starbucks isn’t unusual in terms of construction for a free-standing store plopped-down in a parking lot. These sorts of places are little more than a lightweight metal frame covered in insulating panels, then covered over with a thin stucco-like material. It’s cheap and quick, but it’s also very lightweight.
It should also be noted that the tornado didn’t actually hit the Starbucks. It passed overhead. If it had actually hit it, those panels wouldn’t even be there. Or the cars.
FWIW, I live in Indiana and Wednesday was kind of hectic. We’re more-or-less accustomed to tornadoes, but twisters this late into the summer is not all that common here. Spring is the usual time for this stuff. For example, Palm Sunday.
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Lmao that’s sad. I was raised in Venezuela and when i first moved here to the US someone asked if we had electricity, and coca-cola, if we lived in huts and whatnot.
Granted these days i would say that those questions are not too far from the truth considering the economic situation there.
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And make the whole airplane the black box.
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From TheOnion, in 1998:
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Several years ago a tornado hit downtown Nashville, TN. Even the meteorologists were freaking out because a tornado among high buildings was just not supposed to happen.
I even watched it form from my office. Several of us stood around watching the rotation before someone finally said, “We should get away from the window.”
I hate to be a bearer of bad news but it seems like a tornado can strike anywhere, although some places are much less likely to ever see one.
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Years ago I was at a client in Austin every 3 weeks for two years. After three years elsewhere I’m back to that same routine - but in that away period I dreamt the office was leveled by a tornado – very vivid dream Not ashamed to admit when there’s storms in the area I get scared, and when there’s warnings I’m tempted to call or flat out leave sick.
A F0 tornado, which began as a water spout, hit Long Beach, CA, in 1998. I remember it because it hit the roof of the grocery store across the street from my doctor’s office, where I had an appointment about 15 minutes after it struck.
It ripped off a pretty significant section of the grocery store’s roof (remember, California building codes are pretty stringent due to earthquakes) and it must have passed over the neighborhood high school just seconds before hitting the store. It then moved north northwest, ripping up some of the trees that are behind the house we currently live in, skipping over the houses and then ripping up some of the trees outside the middle school across the major street outside our front door. The scary thing was the time of day; it was after 2 p.m. and kids were heading home from both the high and middle schools and no warning or indicators. There are photos of my immediate neighborhood that show the fallen trees.
I’d rather deal with the rare earthquakes rather than the seasonal tornados. 
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I’ve lived in Austin for 12 years. In that time I’ve seen tornadoes on three or four separate occasions, but only one of them touched down and it was in what was then a field east of Round Rock (now I think it’s another office park). Texas gets an average of 126 tornadoes a year, mostly in the Spring, but most hit in the north for reasons beyond my understanding.
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