4/6/06 :: Report :: OK - Tulsa :: "While I Was At Work"

I was hoping to get out today for a chase close to home before I had to go in to work. I usually go in around 1800hrs, but my supervisor asked if I could come in early, around 1600hrs, to help cover a shift because they were short handed. I knew I was going to miss out on the beginning of the show, but I figured things wouldn't get good until I would have to head to work anyways. Turned out I was right. On my way in to work, I took a quick look at radar and saw that there were some cells firing up north around Osage county. By the time I got to work, they were tornado-warned. As we pulled out of corporate, we get a call down the road. When we arrive, dispatch tells us it's a possible cardiac arrest. Great way to start off the shift. When we get out, a neighbor tells us to enter through the back door and says, "It looks like he's been there a while". Apparently "a while" is roughly two weeks. I open the back door and there's a body laying in the kitchen that is in a state of decomposition. We sat there a while to get some information from the crime scene detectives and I checked radar to see some cells blowing up just southwest of Tulsa. We get another call across town as it starts to rain. As we are taking our patient to the ambulance, the tornado sirens sound. We had a HAM radio in the truck my partner brought and WX5TUL was saying that it was passing south of Tulsa around the Glenpool/Bixby area. After we dropped our patient off at St. Francis, I got a nice shot of the warned cell to the south, which had moved to the east of Tulsa by this time. I just wish I had something more than my camera-phone on me. Our next call took us to Turkey Mountain in west Tulsa/south Jenks. I had a nice view of another cell to the south and tried to get a picture of it, but camera-phones don't handle light-contrast too well. You can see the anvil to the left.