Tornado Warning at WDW!

[DisneyCP2002]

As a former cast memeber I can tell you that there are specific plans in place in case of these things happening. On our first day of orientation we are briefed on each of the three evacuation plans and are told how we are to effectivly move people out in case of emergencies arising. All cast members are trained in how to handle any crisis and we were alerted to any of serious problems via our leads. Just know that Disney does have plans in place

 

[Eiblis]

We had just returned to our room at CBR b4 the rain started....and DD put on the Tv and we heard the tornado warning on the weather channel. Oldest DD (16) wanted to go on balcony to watch the storm.....but DH shut curtains and blinds and panicked.......Heavy winds and lots of thunder but nothing else.....left the room at 8 ish to go to Old Port Royale and it was still raining heavily and you could see lightning lighting the sky.

I know on previous days that there were heavy storms that any water parks shut areas if lightning is anywhere near.
Scariest moment we had was on 9/8 when we had a day at discovery cove. Storm started at 11 ish, and by 1 pm the staff had shepherded ALL guests into the eating and main area of site.
Spoke to a member of staff after and the rule there was.....if storm is within 10 miles..outer water area is shut..if within 5 miles, then all pools are closed. If within 1 mile all guests shepherded to main area.
We couldnt believe the number of ppl that were arguing with the staff and wanting to swim

 

[JBurke]

We were there too that day.
We were just off property eating at Tony Romas when the skies turned dark and it rainied like I have never seen rain before.
IT continued all night.
We didnt find out until the next day about the tonado warning when a CM at Epcot told us they had there hazardous weather plan in place and all crowds in covered areas because a tornado was spoted 6 miles from Pleasure Island.

 

[Virgo10]

Quite a few years ago I was staying at POFQ when it was just PO . A storm started up and I went out with my video camera to film it. Although there wasn't much thunder, the lightning was tremendous.

I got lucky and had my camera pointed at just the right spot at just the right time.

Roberta (who's looking forward to this afternoon in MA when we're suppose to have BIG thunderstorms!
)

 

[michygoomy]

Very, very cool picture there!

 

[wdwguide]

Tornados are not fun! I was in one this June and that was probably the scariest event of my life. If the CMs tell you to get inside while in the parks, I wouldn't take any chances...

 

[peewakio]

Back in '97 we were staying at the Holiday Inn Sunspree when the weather man or woman advised people in the Orlando area to stay away from open spaces due to the possibility of Tornados. I was meant to be playing golf that day (and the day after for that matter) and the wife was indulging in a spot of retail therapy. I decided to stay at the hotel and catch some rays. Suddenly at approx 2.00 the sky turned black so it was off to the hotel room. Whilst on the way up the stairs I could see across to Pleasure Island and could clearly see Planet Hollywood. I stood and just looked at the colour of the sky and wondered how quickly it turned when I noticed to the left what looked to be the formation a funnel. It didn't materialise properly but it made me pretty scared as it could have been no more than 4-5 miles away if that. Anyway later that night the weather reports informed us that 4 active tornadoes touched down in and around Orlando. One actually travelled the length of International Drive although no damage was done. There was however plenty of damaged caused in the Sanford area. So needless to say, golf was cancelled the day after. Up until that episode, one of my ambitions was to see a tornado (as it was to see a bald eagle live, which I did about 5 minutes of leaving the airport on our1st Orlando trip) but I'm not sure about the tornado ambition anymore. If one could touch down in a field then just disappear that would be nice to see, but things are not that simple as you know.
Hopefully, everybody stays safe during the latest spurt of electric weather.

 

[LoriR]

Wow!! We just got back today, and I had no idea there had ever been a warning!! It's probably better I didn't know at the time!

DD, DS, and DH went parasailing in the morning, and we had planned a pretty down day at WL and E-night that evening. I just remember hoping the rain would end before E-night! I would really have been a nervous wreck if I'd heard the tornado warning. Sometimes I feel like I don't know what's happening in the outside world when we're in WDW, but I guess that's part of the magic!

 

[Goofyish]

We were there on the 18th and saw the severe thunderstorm warnings and reports of funnel clouds (possible tornados) on the weather channel (every few minutes an alarm sounded on the TV and the thunderstorm warning came on).

They also warned of hail the size of 'dimes'!!!

 

[goofy4tink]

WE were coming back from SeaWorld and just missed that accident on I 4. It was horrendous. Then we get back to the Polynesian and hop the monorail over to MK for the night. The sky just opened up. It was truly incredible. My 9 y/o dd was terribly afraid during thunderstorms. After this trip I think she has gotten over it. We were stuck in the monorail stop for MK for over an hour. When we found out, the next day, that they had stopped the monorail due to tornado in the clouds, we were a little disconcerted to say the least. I have never seen such a storm. It was incredible just standing there, surrounded by the storm. We finally did make the mad dash for MK, had to buy ponchos because dopey me didn't put ours in our fanny-packs that afternoon. The 18th was just a day not to be forgotten, all the way around.

 

[jann1033]

Originally posted by peewakio
Back in '97 we were staying at the Holiday Inn Sunspree when the weather man or woman advised people in the Orlando area to stay away from open spaces due to the possibility of Tornados. I was meant to be playing golf that day (and the day after for that matter) and the wife was indulging in a spot of retail therapy. I decided to stay at the hotel and catch some rays. Suddenly at approx 2.00 the sky turned black so it was off to the hotel room. Whilst on the way up the stairs I could see across to Pleasure Island and could clearly see Planet Hollywood. I stood and just looked at the colour of the sky and wondered how quickly it turned when I noticed to the left what looked to be the formation a funnel. It didn't materialise properly but it made me pretty scared as it could have been no more than 4-5 miles away if that. Anyway later that night the weather reports informed us that 4 active tornadoes touched down in and around Orlando. One actually travelled the length of International Drive although no damage was done. There was however plenty of damaged caused in the Sanford area. So needless to say, golf was cancelled the day after. Up until that episode, one of my ambitions was to see a tornado (as it was to see a bald eagle live, which I did about 5 minutes of leaving the airport on our1st Orlando trip) but I'm not sure about the tornado ambition anymore. If one could touch down in a field then just disappear that would be nice to see, but things are not that simple as you know.
Hopefully, everybody stays safe during the latest spurt of electric weather.

I used to feel like that also..one where no one/anything was damaged..however I happened to see one in a field coming straight for me and realized I could be "damaged " very easily so so much for THAT idea. a "little" F1 completely took out a historic bridge around here and flattened a lot of metal benches( concreted down so only the remnants) very scary but kind of nice to know WDW has good safety programs

 

[Chim Chiminy]

We were actually at Epcot. We had decided to go to Magic Kingdom since they were having fireworks and Spectomagic that night. Eight out of our party of ten headed to the monorail station, we had just exited Spaceship Earth. We noticed that the sky had darkened considerably and it started to rain. My mother wanted to duck into a shop and stay there to wait. A woman nearby asked how long these showers usually last, and I said "It's Florida. Usually 20 minutes or so, then it passes." We got our hands stamped for re-entry and the skies opened up. It started pouring. We ran for the monorail station, there was quite a bit of lightning. We queued up and waited for a while and no monorail came. After about 15 minutes a monorail could be seen slowly moving its way toward Epcot, but just as it got behind Spaceship Earth, there was a terrible flash of lightning, roar of thunder, and they lost power. The station operator came on and told us that they had just lost power on the entire Epcot grid. We waited some more, visibility was nothing. After a few minutes some rescue vehicles showed up, but after another ten minutes or so, they left. We were told that monorails probably would not be running for some time because this was a "particularly nasty storm system."
Everyone in the station had nowhere they could go. You couldn't go back out in the rain because it was coming down so hard.
It took another 30 or 40 minutes before the power came back up so they could get the monorail into the station, and when it did there was some applause. They were going to open the doors and at least let us sit down in the cars, but they lost power again! One of the castmembers was stuck in the car right in front of us for a few minutes. The emergency release wouldn't work from the inside. We got it open from the outside, and he said he was just happy not to be stuck in there anymore.
They manually opened all the doors and we went inside to sit down.
A woman next to us was on her cell phone talking to her cousin right there in Orlando, who then told us that we were under a tornado warning.
As soon as she said that, a castmember came over the loudspeaker and explained what the problems were with the power, that the storm included a tornado warning, and that they had to shut down all transportation services because of the storm. He said that as soon as they had power back up, they were going to test the monorail system using empty trains (he called the drivers guinea pigs) and once the storm abated somewhat, they were going to send out extra buses to help move guests.
We gave up and once the rain slowed a bit(it didn't stop until around 9pm) we left and went back to BCV to put on some dry clothes. We never did see the fireworks or Spectro on this trip.

 

[Badger Brent]

This is really wild to read about this now. I haven't been on the boards much since our trip 8-11 to 8-18. We were on the runway and waited about 1/2 hour or so before we got clearance to take off. All they said was that bad weather was in the area and we were on stand-by. My afterthought on this is what if the tornado came around the airport? Do they put you back in the airport or leave you on the runway. I'm getting chills thinking about this now. The skies were pretty dark, but we had some decent storms the week we were there. All's well that ends well I guess!!

 

[msteddom]

We were driving from POR to Epcot when the rain started coming down. We turned on the radio while we were waiting in the car in the Epcot parking lot for the rain to die down. That's when we heard about the tornado watch. Well after sitting in the car for about 20 minutes we decided that that was not a good way to spend our last night at WDW, so we put on our ponchos and went out in to the downpour. I'm glad we did becausde it turned out to be a very fun evening. We even got to see Illuminations!!!

Melissa

 

[jann1033]

Originally posted by Chim Chiminy
We were actually at Epcot. We had decided to go to Magic Kingdom since they were having fireworks and Spectomagic that night. Eight out of our party of ten headed to the monorail station, we had just exited Spaceship Earth. We noticed that the sky had darkened considerably and it started to rain. My mother wanted to duck into a shop and stay there to wait. A woman nearby asked how long these showers usually last, and I said "It's Florida. Usually 20 minutes or so, then it passes." We got our hands stamped for re-entry and the skies opened up. It started pouring. We ran for the monorail station, there was quite a bit of lightning. We queued up and waited for a while and no monorail came. After about 15 minutes a monorail could be seen slowly moving its way toward Epcot, but just as it got behind Spaceship Earth, there was a terrible flash of lightning, roar of thunder, and they lost power. The station operator came on and told us that they had just lost power on the entire Epcot grid. We waited some more, visibility was nothing. After a few minutes some rescue vehicles showed up, but after another ten minutes or so, they left. We were told that monorails probably would not be running for some time because this was a "particularly nasty storm system."
Everyone in the station had nowhere they could go. You couldn't go back out in the rain because it was coming down so hard.
It took another 30 or 40 minutes before the power came back up so they could get the monorail into the station, and when it did there was some applause. They were going to open the doors and at least let us sit down in the cars, but they lost power again! One of the castmembers was stuck in the car right in front of us for a few minutes. The emergency release wouldn't work from the inside. We got it open from the outside, and he said he was just happy not to be stuck in there anymore.
They manually opened all the doors and we went inside to sit down.
A woman next to us was on her cell phone talking to her cousin right there in Orlando, who then told us that we were under a tornado warning.
As soon as she said that, a castmember came over the loudspeaker and explained what the problems were with the power, that the storm included a tornado warning, and that they had to shut down all transportation services because of the storm. He said that as soon as they had power back up, they were going to test the monorail system using empty trains (he called the drivers guinea pigs) and once the storm abated somewhat, they were going to send out extra buses to help move guests.
We gave up and once the rain slowed a bit(it didn't stop until around 9pm) we left and went back to BCV to put on some dry clothes. We never did see the fireworks or Spectro on this trip.

Very scary! can you imagine if you were on the monorail and saw a tornado coming your way? ( not that the station is terribly safe either!) you would be sunk, you couldn't even head fo a ditch. Probably a very good thing they shut every thing down even though inconvenient.

 

[Chim Chiminy]

Exactly what we thought. Nowhere to go. The monorail stations are open on all sides, the suction from a tornado would rip through there. But thankfully everything turned out all right. The whole week we had t-storms, and my mom was a wreck. She hates lightning!
Another storm rolled through on Friday the 22nd. It was very nasty as well.
We were out on boats from the Contemporary marina. We had been out for about 20 minutes and were headed for the waterway that takes you to Seven Seas Lagoon. The lifeguard there wouldn't let anyone pass and told us all to turn around. I said there must be a storm coming so we should head in. A lot of people just kept going on there watermice, trying to get in more boating time. Those lifeguards out on the water were zipping around on their boats, sirens and lights blaring telling everyone to head in. The cleared that lake within a few minutes which was pretty impressive to watch.
Sure enough, within five minutes of getting inside the Contemporary the skies opened up. We watched from some windows near the gift shop and visibility was nothing. You could see sheets of rain coming down and trees outside the resort were bending over like twigs. The lightning with this storm was very impressive. We were stuck in there for over an hour before we were able to dash for the van and head back to BCV.