Tornado's telltale sign: pink insulation everywhere
Posted: Thursday, February 12, 2009 12:20 PM
By Al Henkel, NBC News Producer
LONE GROVE, Okla. – It's the insulation in the trees that directs you where to go when you cover a tornado.
More than the twisted siding, or trees down, or flashing emergency lights after dark – tornados always, and I mean always, leave the pink insulation found in your attic and inside the walls of your house everywhere. You’ll see it plastered to the smallest twigs on trees, flapping in the wind on the points of barbed wire, and hidden in places only to resurface weeks or months later.
There's a lot of insulation in the trees here in Lone Grove, Okla. A tornado with winds estimated at 170 mph ripped through Lone Grove just after dark Tuesday night – destroying dozens of homes in its path and leaving at least nine dead.
The neat little trailer park that is allowing us to broadcast used to have a lot of huge oak trees. Those that are standing now look like they have pink leaves because of all the insulation. I've gone back to places hit by tornados a year after the fact, and seen insulation still clinging to branches.
The clean-up is starting in earnest here now, people picking through piles that used to be their homes – coming up with teapots, miraculously unbroken china, and all sorts of things.
A woman across the road from us has been loading up the bed of her pickup truck with bags of her family's clothing for the better part of two hours. She says once it is all washed a couple of times, it should be fine. But right now it’s all covered with tiny bits of pink insulation.
