Mike Dougherty's Blog

When the thunder rolls and the sky gets dark

When the clouds get black overhead in one part of Central Arkansas, it can cause a scare, if not panic, over the rest of the area.

It’s that way here Monday afternoon. My wife, Nancy, who works for a group of oncology doctors next to Baptist Health Medical Center in Little Rock, called to tell me that we needed to turn on the Weather Channel on our newsroom televisions because the dark clouds had arrived in west Little Rock. She said the wall of windows that she and her co-workers face on the north side of their building was rattling from the winds that had picked up since the building storm moved toward them.

Some of us in our offices downtown ran to the front windows. Overhead, the sky was overcast but not particularly disturbing. Looking west, though, we saw a thick layer of gray storm clouds with a blanket along the horizon that were even darker.

Nancy also instructed me to call my parents and tell them to prepare for a storm. My mother has been known to watch St. Louis Cardinals baseball games on television with storms bearing down on them in the Dixon Road area south of Little Rock until she is dragged into the hallway.

It was no different this time. After our session of look-see, I called Mom and told her that Nancy’s office was surrounded by black clouds and that she and Dad should prepare to take cover. She told me that the sun was out and that Dad was outside checking on the garden. I told her what Nancy said and that she should tell Dad to come in. (My folks listen to Nancy’s suggestions much more willingly than they do mine.)

“I’ll tell him,” she said, “but I don’t know if he’ll do it.”

Dad soon will be 75 and Mom is 73, so I guess they can do what they want when it comes to coming in out of the rain, but that means we’ll worry about it until we hear from them after the storm has passed.

I realize that storms sometimes just hit part of an area and I don’t get particularly nervous. However, my wife does — she says it’s our Lhasa apso, Daisy, that she’s concerned about, but it’s not just the dog — so that adds a bit of urgency to our life when the ridiculously large weather maps pop onto our television screens.

Better to be safe rather than sorry, I guess. And I understand the concern.

I moved to Vernon, Texas, and then to Wichita Falls, Texas, in the early 1980s. Each city had been struck by a killer tornado in 1979. Forty-six died in Wichita Falls and 13 fatalities were suffered in Vernon. At those newspapers, we went into crisis mode any time the sky got dark. An excellent weather-spotting system developed from that tornado and its aftermath and that’s what our readers wanted to know any time a threat of storms developed — what was going to happen with the weather.

My complaints will continue about television stations rationalizing their purchase of expensive computer programs for their meteorologists by breaking into my ballgames anytime a storm reaches the edge of the state map. I don’t want to know about a rainy night in Georgia or even Fort Smith or Memphis. But I do get why some people do.