Damn, those first two stories. So tragic, yet so avoidable. Having a flashlight or bathroom won’t even matter if you don’t survive. It’s almost like that wasn’t even considered? Then again, someone in a panic-inducing situation may not be thinking too logically to begin with.This is kind of a weird topic, but I have a certain morbid fascination with the bizarre, almost inexplicable ways that some people die in tornadoes. This weekend I was talking to the granddaughter of the Albion-area woman who was killed in the car I posted photos of the other day. Since she lived in a trailer, the woman's daughter had picked her up and was planning to try and outrun the storm. For some reason, after she got her in the car, she ran back inside to grab a flashlight. It probably only took 30 seconds, but it was long enough - the daughter got back to the car and tried to take off just as the tornado swallowed them up. She was badly hurt but the steering wheel held her in place; her mother was sucked out of the car, thrown into a ditch and killed.
A woman near Cooperstown was killed when she and her husband were running to a cellar out in the yard. She was apparently worried they wouldn't have a bathroom if the house got destroyed, so she told her husband to go ahead while she went back to use the bathroom. Her husband survived unharmed. A similar scene played out near Tionesta, except the wife had gone back to make sure she'd turned the oven off. An Amish man was killed in Atlantic as he sat in his favorite spot on his porch, sipping lemonade and stubbornly refusing to take shelter even as his family begged him to join them in the basement. A man was killed by the Bridge Creek-Moore tornado because he'd just gotten one of those huge mechanic tool sets w/the cart and whatnot and.. I guess thought he was going to protect it somehow?
Those deaths are no less tragic than any others, of course, but it's oddly fascinating to see the strange reasons people end up meeting their fate.
Reminds of when my SO and I were pulling out of the driveway to get the hell out of the way of the Dayton EF4 back in 2019, and he jumped out, ran back inside, then sprinted back out with his phone charger and a water bottle. I about had an aneurism. He’s not from a country that gets violent tornadoes on the reg, so he didn’t quite grasp the seriousness of the situation. He did once I drove him through the damage path though!