Tornado in Bloomington!

Then National Weather Service confirmed that an EF-1 tornado touched down in Bloomington, In with winds speeds of 110 mph on Wednesday night! It was quite a storm. The sirens went off a total of 7 times that evening. We knew it was going to be bad because they had just moved us to the high risk zone before I left at 1. Jenette and the boys hung out at the library.

I was in pediatrics clinic that evening when the tornado sirens went off around 6:00pm and we quickly evacuated all of the patients and huddled into the hallway on the first floor. The sirens went off two more times before we closed the clinic at 8:00pm. Later that night at around 10:00pm is when the tornado touched down on the west end of town. We stayed in a basement at a friends house to be safe from the storm, as they were telling us the night time hours were going to be worse. We're glad we did, something about being stuck in a bathtub on the second floor didn't sit well.

Here are some pictures of the damage.
These first two pictures are courtesy of photographer Ryan Dorgan. You can find more on his site. The tornado demolished a trailer park near Walmart.


The picture below is one Jenette took a couple of miles from our apartment.


There were huge trees down everywhere. Trees were completely uprooted, and one we saw got uprooted and tossed across the street.


This is another picture of the trailer park courtesy of Ryan Dorgan.


This picture does not do the storm justice, but there were streets blocked off by fallen trees and several houses with parts of their roofs torn off.


Here are some more mangled trees. Although, you can't tell from the pictures these are huge trees!

Thankfully, there were no reported fatalities although 17 people were injured. There were 2 other tornado's in neighboring towns, one was a high end EF2 just 20 minutes away! 11 total in all confirmed in Indiana that night! We're counting the days until we leave the midwest and its crazy storms for good.