The Denver Airport Tornado Shelter Portal
I love watching airplanes. I also love watching videos of tornadoes. Fortunately, or not, I have not yet had the chance to see a tornado in person. From enough videos of storm chasers, it seems that most of them are rain-wrapped and not very visible, just appearing as heavy rain and wind.
As you walk by the washrooms at Denver International Airport — DEN — an airport that has a subway that makes a “choo-choo all abound” announcement as it carries passengers between terminals, you see a little decal that states that it’s also a tornado shelter. “That’s convenient” I thought to myself. DEN has seen 26 tornadoes since 1995. They are weak but the shelter is there for those days when there’s an imminent tornado warning and should ever one come barreling towards the terminal.
I hadn’t thought about those shelters until October 7. My family was traveling through Ben Gurion Airport outside of Tel Aviv. We were already up early preparing to leave for our flight when we started to hear the alerts about missiles being fired. Should we stay or should we go? Will it be safe on the way to the airport? If we do stay, for how long? If we go, what do we do on the way? We made the decision to go, with alerts going off on our phones every minute. The drive was 40 minutes but seemed to take much longer. We didn’t know about the other violence that was happening together with the missiles and I’m not sure how it would have affected our decision.
I wrote about my feelings of this day before and am still processing them. A lot was happening.
On the 7th, when I saw that the bathroom areas at the TLV airport were the dedicated hardened areas, it reminded me of the same areas at Denver airport for tornadoes. “That’s pretty convenient,” I thought, “missile shelter in the washroom… for when the fear is overwhelming.” By the time we had reached the terminal, completed check in, baggage drop off, security checks, and passport control, the news was starting to trickle in about early about casualties.
What was interesting about the situation was how that moment so vividly connected back to a memory. It felt like how people describe wormholes that link two areas of time and space nearly instantly, but with a different flavour. It was at this acute time that I felt like a time traveler, able to visit myself at a different moment in my life, a different set of circumstances, but connected by just a fluke factor of being a shelter area at an airport.
These memories and connections may have absolutely no meaning. They may be a random type of wiring between different regions in the brain through spindle cell activities. But to me and to anyone else who experiences them, they mean the world. They are the world.
Wouldn’t it be helpful to have an inventory of experience-altering shortcuts that could help enhance the understanding of ourselves and those around us?
