Cob Jockey

On Wednesday night, Mary came down. Our plan, which we had been building Disco toward for two weeks, was to lunge him over a raised pole with me on his back to get him to (finally) canter under saddle.

"Keep an eye on the weather, there's a very slight chance of severe weather tonight," I told her as she left.

I'm a trained storm spotter with the National Weather Service - the kind of person who reads paragraphs of Forecast Discussion notes from meteorologists twice a day when they update the forecast just for fun. Total weather nerd. So I knew the risk was minimal to low on Wednesday, and I was aware, but not concerned.

Mary and I lunged him without a rider first, then we discussed the game plan as I got on his back. "Okay, you're going to be cuing everything, I'm just holding the lunge line. As you approach the fence, get in two point, put your leg in the canter cue position and use your voice to ask him to canter. If he canters, great, let him keep going as long as he wants, but it probably won't be long. And bring him back to a trot before the next fence if he gets that far. We'll do it a few times on one side and a few times on the other."

With that, I walked him onto the circle. We got exactly half a circle into it when the sirens went off:

I know you can't hear a GIF, but just before I stop him, loud tornado sirens start, Mary asks what I want to do, and I jump off casually saying "Let me look at the radar."

 

I jumped off and checked the velocity radar scans on my phone. Unlike the usual reflectivity radar that shows precipitation, this type of radar scan shows you whether winds are moving toward or away from the radar site. If they're moving both toward and away from the radar in a specific spot, that's rotation, and it shows up as the confluence of green and red in one spot. If it's strong rotation, that spot lights up brighter and brighter.

During a tornado warning we had had the previous week, I rolled over in bed, checked the velocity radar, saw a weak area of rotation on the other side of the county, and went back to sleep. 

This time, I checked the velocity radar and saw a bright, clear tornado signature heading straight for the barn. "We need to go NOW," I told Mary.

The tornado signature is the confluence of the red and the brightest green color, just down and to the right from the little tornado icon.

 

We rushed poor Disco into his stall, stripped his tack, left it on the ground, left all the lights on and booked it back to my house to get in the cellar.

When we came out of the cellar a half hour later after the storm had just passed, I stepped onto the front porch and heard the unmistakable roar of a tornado to the east, moving away from us. Like low, continuous thunder that didn't stop.

Yeesh.

 

During the damage survey the next day, the NWS found that an EF-2 with max winds of 112mph had passed just two miles away from us and was on the ground for 13 continuous miles. No one was hurt, but unfortunately a couple of farm families lost entire (non-animal) barns and grain siloes. How easily that could have been us! 

 

Red dot is the barn

My night wasn't over, since the power was out, and uh, it didn't look like it would come back anytime soon.

There's a whole row of these things bent over like this one mile from the farm.

 

The farm is on a well, and it only has about an hour's worth of water in reserve before the pump needs electricity to pull more up. Since we have auto-waterers that only keep a very small amount in the stalls and then fill continuously to add more while a horse drinks, this essentially means we NEED backup power for any outage lasting longer than an hour. 

For that reason, the barn owners put a permanent generator in that runs off a house-sized propane tank that sits off in the woods you can see in the distance below.

It's the beige box in the front landscaping.

My BO has always insisted they've never needed that generator in 18 years, that because they buried all of the power lines to the farm when they built it, power rarely goes out for more than an hour, and he does have a solid backup plan to use the water wagon to trailer some over from his house across the ravine if everything really goes to hell.

But I'm neurotic about horses, water, and climate change, so I insisted on getting the generator running last year, which thanks to Leah's husband and my SO (who both, conveniently, work for a diesel engine company and both, specifically, have a lot of generator experience, just usually more on the datacenter scale than the farm scale), we did exactly that last year.

I was so grateful to hear the roar of that thing Wednesday night and to watch the well pump pressure gauge go up when it needed to.

 

I started getting targeted advertising for generators two hours after some frantic texts and phone calls to my boarder and my SO as I stumbled through my first time running a generator, because of course I did.

Thankfully, the power came back on after about four hours, so it ended up just being a good test for the generator and for me knowing how to use it. I am so grateful it wasn't worse.

 

A house near the farm I pass pretty regularly

(Side note: the warning was issued at 8:16pm, and the tornado didn't hit until 8:44pm, giving Mary and I plenty of time to take shelter. Also, the warning polygon shape ended up precisely covering the exact path the tornado ended up taking. All that is to say, the NWS is AWESOME and has made such incredible forecasting advancements in the last 20 years especially, and anyone that wants to defund them is an absolute moron that doesn't understand the good work these people do for honestly pretty low pay given how many lives they save every year. Ahem.)

Due to the impending Particularly Dangerous Situation...

...I woke up well before dawn to get feeding, turnout and stalls done early so I could get home before the storms hit.  One of the thoughts in my head when I woke up at 5:30 this morning (besides "COFFEEEE...") was that a lot of the people that read this blog don't live in tornado-prone areas and wouldn't know what goes into preparing a horse facility for tornadic weather.

I grew up in Illinois and now live in Indiana, and, fun fact, I am a trained storm spotter with the National Weather Service.  I have distinct memories of my mom putting halters on our horse and donkey every time a tornado watch was issued.  We Midwesterners usually get 1-2 days notice that there might be severe weather, and 0-10 minutes to prepare for an actual tornado headed our way.  These are the rules I live by during tornado season:

If you're a barn owner, groom, barn worker, or otherwise responsible for the horses' well-being:

A horse being rescued from a barn hit by an F5 tornado in Oklahoma earlier this year.

1) Figure out the safest place for the horses to be during the storm and put them there.  Unless your barn is made of rebar-reinforced concrete block, the safest place for them to be is almost certainly going to be outside in your fields, where they will have a fighting chance of survival in the event of a direct hit by a tornado.  Inside the barn, they are sitting ducks for injury should the barn collapse around them.  You'll hear the opposing viewpoint too, but in the event of a direct hit, I truly believe outside is better.

2) Make your horses easy to catch and identify in the event that they get loose.  If a tree, tornado or high wind takes down your fence and your horses escape, you'll want them to be wearing halters to make catching easier, preferably with your name and address on them - hence my mom's pre-storm ritual.

3) Do whatever you need to do to prepare the barn for a power outage.  Usually tornado-induced power outages aren't as lengthy as hurricane-induced outages, but if you store temperature-sensitive medication or the barn gets really dark without light, you'll want to plan to have backup power and flashlights stored around the barn.

4) Check your emergency kit, and make sure you're prepared to deal with injuries caused by flying debris, such as glass, as well as puncture wounds and lacerations.

If you're a boarder: 

Document, document, document!

1) Are the things you store at the barn covered under your homeowners or renters insurance? (Probably not.)  Does the barn's insurance policy cover the things you store at the barn?  (Probably not.)  You'll likely need to look into a rider on your homeowners or renters policy in order to cover your saddles and other expensive tack - luckily, riders like that tend to not be very expensive at all.

2) Pertinent to #1, make sure you have detailed photos (and a video walk-through, ideally) of all of the things you store at the barn, as well as documentation that lists the serial number, date of purchase, and approximate value.  Copies of original receipts and invoices are invaluable when you're trying to prove the value of the lost or damaged items to your insurance company.

Hopefully you never have to use this advice, (besides the insurance advice, which goes for other types of loss such as theft also), but in the event that you do, or you're just curious about what is a pretty common ritual in this part of the US, I hope you learned something useful!