Tornadoes – those fearsome, unpredictable natural disasters that take people’s lives and destroy property – have been much in the news these last several weeks.
Ah, Spring. When flowers bloom and the days get warmer and longer – and when unbelievably powerful, swirling columns of air descend from the heavens and frighten the bejesus out of everyone in their path.
Yes, tornadoes.
I used to live in the Midwest, where these storms happen with regularity every Spring and tear up and down the so-called “Tornado Alley.” Yes, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri usually get hit the worst by these Springtime monsters, but – as we’ve seen in 2024 – nowhere in any of the 50 states is totally immune to their sudden dramatic arrival.
It might surprise you to learn (it did me) that even Hawaii gets an occasional tornado. So does Alaska, but in neither state has there ever been any recorded deaths from the storms.
Sometimes people call a tornado a cyclone (remember when Dorothy called one that in The Wizard of Oz?). But they are in fact different. A tornado is formed over land, while a cyclone is formed over water but then can move onto land.
As they both form over water, cyclones and hurricanes are essentially the same, with hurricanes forming in the Atlantic and cyclones forming in the Pacific and Indian oceans.
Here’s another interesting tornado tidbit: These storms tend to rotate counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern.
But not always.
Why? It’s a matter of some disagreement among weather experts. Let’s just say regardless of which direction they rotate, they can be extremely dangerous.
And deadly.
While the U.S. averages about 70-80 tornado-related deaths annually, there have been some extremely deadly years -- such as 2011, when 324 were killed across six states.
While I was still living in my home state of Iowa, I always wanted to see an actual tornado. But I never did in my 33 years there. However, Iowa in recent years has apparently become much more a part of the Midwest’s infamous Tornado Alley.
A recent round of tornadoes in Iowa was especially intense, with poor little Greenfield (pop. about 2,000) getting walloped by a deadly storm that killed four people and injured about three dozen others.
I guess I'm lucky to be living in Colorado, where tornadoes -- at least near the mountains where I reside -- are pretty rare. Not so, however, on Colorado's wide-open Eastern Plains, where tornadoes are much more common.
Tornado in United Kingdom
While the United States records by far the most tornadoes in any given year (https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/here-s-why-the-us-has-more-tornadoes-than-any-other-country/ar-BB1nplpD?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=1bfa06c0c423436ebc7afd9815fee6ce&ei=20), the storms are not limited to America or the Western Hemisphere. According to the Internet, tornadoes occur on every continent in the world except Antarctica.
That includes Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. But for some reason, we rarely hear of tornadoes in those areas — mostly because they are relatively rare compared to the U.S. and usually not that destructive.
With the advent of legions of fearless tornado chasers and high-tech drones, today we have tons of amazing footage of tornadoes up close and extremely personal.
Having seen their incredible power so very close, I am now quite happy that I've never seen an actual, real-life tornado.
And I hope I never will.
Living in central Iowa, this column is topical, especially this Spring, as there have been SO many tornadoes. Some of us have progressed from wondering whether we'll get hit to wondering when we'll get hit. It's terrifying, especially after dark when we can't see anything outside. And we're at the mercy of the ignorant folks denying climate change. God help us.