!Tornadoes down the ridge --- agk's diary 18 May 2025 @ 13:14 UTC --- written on HP200LX in the tent while daughter sleeps in and the creek still rushes over the road uploaded from GPD MicroPC at home --- Yesterday we lead a third as many people through the cave as we did at last year's open house. Less than 700 people. It was hot. I was miserable from pollen. I wanted to be in the cool damp. All us volunteers slept poorly the night before. Some partied, some tried to sleep but the storm was ferocious. My daughter was awake many times in the night. Water found its way under our closed-cell foam ridge-rests, dampened my sheet where it extended past the mats. In the morning the water over the road between our camp and the cave was waist-high, swift and very dangerous. Thirty km to the south, tornadoes killed twenty people and destroyed a neighborhood subdivision. This morning at the hospital where she works, Evy may have injured survivors. I haven't seen news, and won't til I get back to town, but I looked at Randall and Thor's pictures and listened to Randall on a quiet walk in the cave last night. He worked forty-five tornadoes this year. This is the one that got to him. They shut down the northbound highway to land heli- copters. Someone dumped rubble to build a ramp. Responders like Randall carried bodies up it. Victims were triaged onto transport. FBI death investigators came in, maybe to provide unified command for the coroners in the hard hit counties. Randall says 100 Guardsman arrived, so the governor declared a state of emergency. Kirsten said our neighbors in the holler to the east are without power. So are something like 200,000 other people. We were hot, sneezing yester- day, waiting in a place without cell service for our neighbors to come on cave tours. We had no idea they were so bad off. Cicadas molted in their millions, shushing all through the woods. They perched on trees, tents, sticks, stared with red pop-eyes from bodies white as they emerged from their old skin, hardening to black as they dried. I was elected vice-chair of my cave club. I asked if we could lend a hand with post-tornado demolit- ion or rebuilding next month. The motion passed. The stars came out. The cicadas slept.