[-STAT-]

Just sad & tragic what happened down that way. I live in Floyd Co and luckily, we were spared but still made for a lot of pacing back & forth last Friday night.

When you've got meteorologist's who have been in that business for many years saying they've never seen a stretch of weather like we've had literally since the beginning of 2025, that really puts it into perspective of how bad it's been for entire state, especially our part of the state.

January started out with a bad ice storm, plus a huge winter storm on top of that, literally took a month for everything to thaw out, soon as it does, we get devastating flooding in February the likes that this area hasn't seen in many years. Folks still recovering from that, and since then it's been severe thunderstorms, and up until Friday, deadly & violent tornadoes.

NWS officially confirmed it was an EF-4 tornado that ripped through the Somerset/London areas. I'm a few hours away from there but all this took me back to the tornado outbreak in March of 2012, that ripped through West Liberty, Salyersville, and parts of Johnson Co, which is a lot closer to home. I think it was an EF-3 that hit those areas. I drove through the Salyersville area the next day on restaurant row and it was a literal war zone, like someone just dropped a bomb on the town. One thing that stuck out the most, there is a shell station there, somehow got spared, the only thing that didn't was the letter S on the sign, so it just showed hell, and that's pretty much what it was. Then seeing pictures & videos of the destruction in London & Somerset areas, just paints a heartbreaking picture of how fierce mother nature can be.

I have a bad feeling that this may be the new norm for our areas around here, not necessarily in tornado alley, but dixie alley is what I've seen it referred to.

My thoughts & prayers go out to everyone effected by these tragedies.