First things first, KU won the NCAA national championship basketball game in overtime. KU has a great basketball tradition, and over the years has done well. Our state may be less than 1% of the national population, but we have produced the best college basketball team in the nation. If you haven't seen the movie "Hoosiers", it is worth a watch. It is about a 1950s smalltown high school basketball team in Indiana. It is a good movie in its own right, but it also does a good job of portraying the social aspects of life in a small farm town, and the importance small communities place in high school athletics. If anyone happens to watch it(if it is available in the UK) let me know what you think of it.
As my previous blog started to state, the weather radio went off several times again last night, prompting me to start a late night blog as I stayed awake looking at the approaching storm on the computer. As I said, we were paged out to aid the one deputy on duty for the entire 500+ square mile north end of our county. The job of a storm spotter in our community is two fold, first to be an on the ground source of information the Sheriff dispatcher supposedly relays to the National Weather Service to help them decide what warnings need to be issued, our most pressing job is it is our observations that lead us to decide if we will set off the tornado sirens for our community, it is quite a low tech procedure, we watch, and one or two guys sit in the firebarn watching the computer and listening to us, should we make the call to set off the sirens they are to pull the lever and take cover. Spotting at night is quite hard and dangerous, luckily most severe storms happen during the heat of the day and not at night. Last night was a hail and wind event, ended up getting about an inch of pea sized hail making the roads nearly impassible. I suppose anyone reading this has to wonder why I would want to do this, although I don't know the level of volunteerism in the UK. At least part of our population places value on community service, and I am in that part. With our sparse population we have a low tax base in rural counties, leaving many of our emergency services to volunteers. When the fire department was approached about storm spotting some years ago I thought it meant we would sit in our homes and tell someone what was happening, I didn't realize it meant going after the storm so to speak. I have to admit, I like it in the daytime, it is pretty interesting, however last night as my pickup was pelleted with relentless hail and I nearly skidded off the road, I questioned my decision to do this. The storm made quite an impression on Mrs. KF. She was soundly sleeping when I returned home, and even though I had announced my departure, she asked, "did you go somewhere last night?" over breakfast this morning.
Youtube has some good tornado video, do a search for "Yates Center Tornado". That storm started in our county(Woodson county is one county southeast of us) and produced a tornado here, in fact that tornado was probably the "baby" tornado that led to the one taped. I spotted on that storm. This is the video taken closest to where I live, and is pretty interesting to watch.