Last weekend, the family went to the theater to see Twisters. A movie set in Oklahoma about tornadoes and Oklahoma’s family of Storm Chasers. It was a movie of course but hey it was pretty good. Here’s a trailer.

I won’t go into the plot. Nobody cares about the plot right! It’s got some great storm scenes, romance, a villain, heroes and great ending where everything is all wrapped up.

The big tornado in the movie hit the town of El Reno which is west of Oklahoma City a half hour or so. It turns out that El Reno was close to a real tornado (the El Reno-Piedmont Tornado) in May 2011 that had the highest winds ever recorded on the planet at about 210 miles per hour. It was so powerful it knocked down a drilling rig of one of my employers customers.

Believe it or not but drilling companies have safety protocols for drilling rigs. For one thing that put as much drill pipe in the hole as they can. This rig had 200,000 pounds of drillpipe. That helps hold down the rig. The drilling rig weighed 2 million pounds and is tied down by guy wires at four corners. The storm toppled the rig and turned it over several times. The contraption you see sticking out of the ground is the blow out preventer which is attached to the casing of the well. It is very stout and is still at a 30 degree angle or so.

The workers were sheltered in the “dog house” or changing room. Part of the safety protocol is the dog house is held down by four large helical anchors drilled into the ground. The anchors held but the structure suffered some damage but none of the workers sheltering in it were seriously hurt.

My employer at the time elected to add underground tornado shelters at many of their surface facilities including this one at a compressor station in the El Reno area.

In the movie, the main tornado is shown going through a refinery. That didn’t happen in the real El Reno tornado but it did go through a large natural gas processing plant owned by one of my employers competitor/customers and put it out of commission for months. My employer was neighborly and had some spare capacity so we (and other companies in the area) helped tide them over until they get things going again.

I happened by the area about a month later and too a couple of photos.

Trees were debarked, wheat fields were stripped bare of the wheat.

It was kind of eerie. I didn’t take any photos of destroyed houses or businesses. I stayed away from those areas. The residents don’t appreciate snooping like that. Nine people died as a result of the tornado including several who were caught in their vehicles while driving on Interstate 40.

I’ve never seen an actual tornado but we have had to retreat to our “safe space” a bunch of times of the years. And of course we take our critters with us.

They don’t like it much.

One thing about the movie that is true is the storm chasers. They are folk heroes in Oklahoma and here is a page where you can track them when they are active.

The storm trackers are celebrities. Here is Brandon Wells of Tulsa’s Channel 6 in last year’s Veterans Day Parade. I think he is on facebook.

Anyway, see the movie. It’s fun. I give five stars out of five.