Many, many years ago I had to collect some samples at retail in Dallas and drive them to Ft. Smith, Arkansas which was about a 5 hour drive. I don't recall the route I took but I do remember seeing all the homes with "fraidy holes" in their side yards. Fraidy holes are what them Texicans called tornado shelters.
Another time I was driving from Ft. Smith to Tulsa at dusk and saw two tornados crossing the flat land near Muskogee, OK. We spent the night at a motel near the airport because we had an early flight Two tornados hit Tulsa that night a few miles from where we were. The weather was so rough I went looking for a fraidy hole myself.
P.S. We had an old saw mill on our property. What was left of it including mounds of rotted sawdust was down in the woods next to where we grew a garden growing up. Garden was a relative term because my father planted rows over a hundred feet long and we would have two or three rows of corn, a couple rows of tomatoes, beans, squash, okra... Let's just say we had a big garden and I wore out more than one hoe chopping weeds in the red clay that provided the soil in our garden.
The reason that the the old saw mill is important to this story is because it served as a nesting area for copperhead snakes. Me and my uncles who were just a few years older than me discovered that fact when Grandma sent us down to the rotted sawdust piles to get wheelbarrow loads of sawdust that she would put in her flower beds. We unearthed a bed of copperhead babies while digging up the sawdust.
Those snakes liked to live in our garden particularly under the tomato plants. Tomatoes in those days were primarily vine tomatoes that sprawled all over the ground and the snakes would crawl in the tomato patch to get out of the sun. Pop, my grandfather was bitten on the little finger while he was picking tomatoes. My Uncle Steve had a copperhead strike at him and hit the tomato he had in his hand. My mother would pick tomatoes in an old 5 gallon enameled bucket which had some rusted out holes in the bottom. One day she bought home a bucket of tomatoes for canning and put it on the kitchen counter. Next thing I knew she was screaming and calling for me. Yep, she had brought home a little copperhead that had crawled out of the tomato patch into her bucket. I used a worn out hoe to provide some discipline for that snake. He never crawled in Mama's bucket again. I guarantee that!