VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — Whenever there's a big weather event like Sunday's tornado, I think it's important to get out of the studio and get a firsthand look.
After all, we're interpreting pixels on a computer screen.
It's important to see that those little blobs on the radar represent people's homes, people's belongings and sometimes even people's lives.
Thankfully—miraculously—no one was killed or even seriously hurt during the Great Neck tornado.
Visiting the neighborhood, it was clear to me that these substantial, well-built brick homes offered really good protection to the folks sheltering inside.
I think if that same monster tornado had hit a similar neighborhood of vinyl-siding homes or—God forbid— a mobile home community, the death toll would have been staggering.
That being said, the violent 145-to-150-mile-per-hour winds ripped the roofs off of many homes.
I know most of the folks inside got the warnings and sheltered where they were supposed to: on the lowest floor of the home.
That should be a reminder to all of us: the safety advice we give out during tornado coverage and repeat and repeat actually works.
When Meteorologist Kristy Steward and I were tracking the storm on Sunday, we spotted what was clearly tornado debris on the radar. First Warning Radar can pick out things that are larger than raindrops and that confirms to us that there is, in fact, a tornado on the ground.
But this was the biggest debris signature either one of us had ever seen.
In the back of our minds, we were thinking that it might have been some sort of radar quirk.
It wasn't.
Visiting the neighborhood in Great Neck, I saw tree branches, roof shingles, and pieces of homes and belongings spread all over. I understood why we were seeing such a huge tornado debris signature.
And that's another reason it's important to visit the scene of big weather events like this.
