Appalachian on the Prairie: Am I chasing storms or are the storms chasing me?

Two of the things I dreaded most when we moved to Minnesota was the prospect of more snow and the potential for tornadoes.

Snow was no stranger to West Virginia. We received plenty of it in some years. But I am not a fan. Trace amounts are plenty for me. I do enjoy those evenings when the snow is falling and the sound mutes out all other things. It’s just that those evenings are also the ones where you have some place you need to go.

Tornadoes, or the threat of tornadoes, are a new experience altogether.

We lived in Benson for two years, which is much flatter than this part of Minnesota. I expected a lot more tornadic activity.

In that time, we had only one tornado siren and I missed it because I was already in the basement working with my headphones on.

We’ve lived in this area for less than a year and have been subjected to three tornado warnings in that time.

Much like snow, all three warnings have come when I had some place I needed to be.

Professional storm chaser and superior newspaperman, Jarrod Schoenecker, laughs at my abundance of caution. Tornadoes are a mythical concept to me, only seen in videos, movie depictions and a recurring nightmare I had when I was a kid.

West Virginia does have tornadoes, but they are often on the fringes of the state, in the Ohio River Valley or the Eastern Panhandle near D.C.

Most range from EF0 to EF2, though an F4 killed 103 people in 1944.

There have only been 192 tornadoes in West Virginia’s 161-year history. In writing this column, I discovered this year set the record for most tornadoes in The Mountain State at 14.

In the area where I lived, there were far too many mountains to allow a hearty tornado to touchdown. Our contention via wind came in microbursts or derechos.

Some other time, I’ll tell you a long story about the June 2012 derecho that took a bite out of the Eastern U.S.