My Brush with the Myrtle Beach Tornado in 2001

That afternoon started like any other summer afternoon.  It was hot and humid and a few storms were already popping up around the area. As I watched the storms develop on radar, I noticed the Columbia doppler radar was down for maintenance so I relied solely on the Wilmington doppler radar.  All of a sudden, as if the radar had been turned off, I lost all data from that site as well.  It turns out the radar had been knocked out by lightning from the very storm that would produce the tornado in Myrtle Beach. Talk about a series of unfortunate events. From a radar perspective, I was now flying blind. About 15-20 minutes later, I got a call from a frantic lady who swears a tornado had just passed by their hotel on 28th Avenue North. Other calls came in with reports of power poles being snapped.  I was a bit skeptical . Tornadoes are rare in the first place, and we were also way past our primary tornado season. But with no radar to reference, I went outside on the back deck of the weather center to take a look.  From that spot, I had an ideal view of the north end of the Grand Strand.  Utterly shocked, I saw a water spout/tornado coming ashore between 10th and 15th avenues north heading right for the Pavilion and our office!  I ran inside, told the Pavilion management what was unfolding then turned our tower camera northward to get a view. Immediately, the wind started howling and our only window was being blasted by sand from the beach that was being sucked toward the tornado. I didn't hesitate to do what I tell everyone else to do. I took cover in the small, interior bathroom in the office.  It seemed like I was in there for an eternity, but it turns out I was there for only about a minute! Once the roaring sound of the wind subsided, I rushed outside, looked up and was stunned to see this magnificent funnel reaching from the cloud to the ground near 5th Avenue North, just 3 blocks south of me.  This thing was big...MUCH bigger than when I first saw it north of the Pavilion.  From there, my meteorological instincts took over. I got on the phone with my boss and she immediately got me on the air with anchors Allyson Floyd and Keith Sterling. Our tower camera had a perfect shot of a large tornado moving south through Myrtle Beach. We were able to share it live with everyone watching. Over the next 30-45 minutes, the tornado hopped back and forth between the ocean and land before becoming obscured by rain and lifting near Springmaid Resort.

Post-9/11, biggest terror threat is underground - WMBFNews.com ...

By TOM HAYS
Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) - It's the morning rush in the Times Square subway station, a routine convergence of humanity and mass transit that makes New York City hum. Mixing seamlessly with subway riders are New York Police Department officers with heavy body armor and high-powered rifles, commanders in blue NYPD polo shirts carrying smart phone-size radiation detectors and a panting police dog named Sabu.

"This is the new normal," Inspector Scott Shanley of the NYPD's Counterterrorism Division says. "The only people who sometimes get raised up are tourists."

Since terrorists brought down the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, subways have been bombed in terror attacks across the world, including in Madrid, London and this spring in Minsk, Belarus. The possibility that New York's sprawling, porous and famously gritty subway system could be next has become a constant worry - leading to a new normal of suspicious package alerts, bomb-sniffing dogs, cameras trained on commuters and passengers listening to the missive, "if you see something, say something."

The campaigns encouraging residents to report suspicious activity strike Manhattan writer Anne Nelson, 57, as Orwellian.

"New York is about expression and life and vibrancy," she said, walking through Times Square. "It's not about living in an atmosphere of fear."

But authorities here believe a serious attack on the 24-hour subway system with more than 400 stations, would potentially cripple the city in ways worse than the Sept. 11, 2001 attack - a concern shared by U.S. cities and countries reliant on mass transit and viewed as enemies by terrorists.

The human toll - going back to Aum Shinrikyo cult's 1995 nerve gas attack that killed 12 people and injured thousands in Tokyo's subways - has already been devastating. In Madrid, Islamic militants set off 10 backpack bombs on the commuter rail network in 2004, killing 191 people and wounding more than 1,800; in London, another suicide bomb strike killed 52 commuters and injured 700 in the city's deadliest attack since World War II; and earlier this year in Minsk, a remote-controlled bomb killed 12 people and wounded 200 in the city's main subway station.

In New York, no one has pulled off an attack, but there have been plenty of scares.

Last year, a homegrown al-Qaida operative, Najibullah Zazi, pleaded guilty to plotting a suicide bomb attack timed for rush hour to cause the most bloodshed. The former airport shuttle driver told a judge his plan was "to conduct a martyrdom operation on the subway lines in Manhattan." The NYPD also foiled a 2004 plot to bomb Manhattan's Herald Square subway station. And there were reports in that al-Qaida considered a cyanide attack on the subway system in 2003.

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