Oklahoma’s Rarest Weather Advisory – The TORFF Warning

As Oklahoma gears up for what is expected to be a long and wild severe weather season, have you been unfortunate enough to hear the state's rarest weather warning over the radio?

It's called a TORFF Warning, and it's a mash-up of two of the most dangerous weather-related events you could encounter.

Obviously, the TOR has to be a good old-fashioned Tornado Warning. Who hasn't heard one of those at least once in their life?

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The FF is the dreaded and even more dangerous Flash Flood Warning.

I know it's hard to imagine any situation where a tornado happens at the same time and in the same place as a flash flood, but it has happened.

The only time I've experienced it was at Rocklahoma over Memorial Day Weekend in 2015. It rained cats and dogs for weeks leading up to the festival, and that particular weekend, the skies opened up again pouring torrential rainfall on the festival grounds.

Bands were canceled, and the crowd of 70,000 were advised to seek refuge in their vehicles in the hopes the storm would pass.

Having been there every year since it started, we opted to cut our losses that Saturday night and go back to the house early. As it turned out, that was the right call.

Since spring that year was so wet, everything was saturated with water: the fields, ditches, and gravel lots. The creek that flows around the festival grounds instantly flooded, coming way up out of its banks. Social media was filled with "Our tent is underwater" posts, and I believe a few festival-goers even ended up drowning that year—not at the festival but in trying to get home in that storm.

As if it couldn't get any worse, the tornado sirens sounded off while all the flooding was happening. Imagine being in a situation where you had to get underground, but there was no underground to go to due to the water.

It certainly was Mother Nature's cruelest event.