TULSA, Okla. — A love story with a tornadic touch that's what happened when Matt Michell proposed to Becky Patel with an EF-3 tornado backdrop.
The pair are known to chase storms yearly, Michell being a guide taking groups to hunt down cells.
When he thought about proposing to Patel, he knew it was time to go big. Michell said they saw several tornadoes on their trip many being small before they landed in Arnett, Oklahoma.
Patel and Michell said they were sitting in their jeep when the cloud started to circulate over them.
"Becky was looking through the sunroof watching it start and I was like, ‘Oh boy. This is close stuff here." So I kind of beelined out of there and went to a dirt road and luckily it developed into a beautiful cone-shaped tornado," Michell said.
That’s when the ingredients for the storm and proposal all came together.
"The first words I said to him were, ‘Are you joking? Are you joking?’ and then I realized what was happening and the rest of it was kind of blanked out from my memory," said Patel.
"I look back at the footage and see me jumping and screaming and I don’t remember any of that but I think that it was just pure emotion and joy and it was just so, I couldn’t have asked for anything better," Patel said.
National Weather Service reports rated the tornado an EF-3 with estimated winds hitting 145 mph.
Fortunately, the NWS said this tornado mainly stayed in the open Oklahoma plains being a beautiful less destructive storm.
As for the couple, Patel lives in Toronto and Michell in northern Illinois so they have plans to get married and move in with each other.
"I’m trying to convince him to move to Oklahoma so we can see more tornadoes," said Patel.
Of course, as Oklahomans, we'd welcome them with open arms.
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