Had a moment of real parental anxiety yesterday. We had a wave of powerful supercell thunderstorms blow through yesterday afternoon right as I was supposed to leave work. Amherst’s town alert system went off and our campus police told everyone to take shelter. I ended up with a bunch of my coworkers in the basement of my building. My house is about 15 minutes away to the SE of our campus. The storms hitting us then would reach my house in 10-15 minutes, and I sat there wondering whether I should rush home trying to outrun the storms in order to be home with my infant son, or to stick it out and hope for the best. I was really conflicted. Brady was home with my mother in law, and given my druthers I’d rather have been there, but I ended up concluding sticking tight was the safest thing. I wouldn’t have been much help to him if I’d gotten stuck or worse on my way home.

In the end everything worked out fine. My mother in law took him down into the basement and they waited things out. Later that night we had to grab him out of bed and head down into the basement again when another line of supercells passed through, but no tornadoes touched down either at home or work. We do have friends whose neighborhoods and possibly houses have been damaged though, so today I’ve got my fingers crossed for them. All told 7 tornadoes touched down in our region, and so far 4 people are reported dead. Scary stuff when it hits this close to home.