Reminded of the Clovis tornado of 2007

Local columnist

link Karl Terry

As I looked through online photo coverage of the recent tornado outbreak in Oklahoma, the sights took me back eight years.

Trees stripped bare, looking like skeletons. Insulation scattered everywhere. Roofs gone and walls knocked to splinters. That’s what a portion of Clovis looked like when I was finally able to tour the damage two days after the March 23, 2007, tornado.

I’ll never forget that day. I was reminded of it earlier in the week as I drove home from work and the emergency broadcast system sounded on the radio, warning of severe thunderstorms and rotating clouds in De Baca and Chaves counties. I was driving down the road that was flooded late that night as I went to my house to download content and wire stories for the newspapers we were trying desperately to get out with coverage of the storm.

Before that day I never took much concern about tornadoes. Living in eastern New Mexico we would glimpse a towering, anvil-shaped storm cloud full of lightning and know that the Texas Panhandle was going to have a sleepless night.

It’s not that I thought we were untouchable, it’s just that I had seen very little evidence of actual tornadoes in New Mexico. I remember a Quonset barn blown apart on a farm near Portales when I was young. I also remember seeing several semi-trucks overturned on I-40 near San Jon. Both, I believe, were done by a tornado.

I have never actually seen a tornado on the ground and I spent a lot of time outdoors when I was young.

I remember as a boy watching a little funnel cloud poking in and out of the bottom of a cloud but the weather near me never got even a little bit ugly.

Another time in downtown Tucumcari I thought I was about to buy the farm as I watched the clouds right above me commence to rotate. I figured if that cloud had dropped a twister it would have been right on my head. Fortunately, nothing happened but rain and wind.

The evening of March 23, 2007, my wife and I actually chased the storm that went through Clovis from Dora to the Cacahuate Road and never saw a twister on the ground. We did experience the eeriest outflow from that storm I’ve ever seen. From the time I started chasing that storm I felt like there was something different, something electric about the storm. When we saw that sudden shift in wind direction as we hit that outflow, I knew it was serious.

These days I still don’t worry about a tornado, but I have a different respect for the possibility that we might have another one. I keep a closer watch on the skies and the weather radar, and when the warning goes out I remember what I saw in the early spring of 2007.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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