Your Survival Blog
Don’t make me release the flying monkeys!
Since the film of The Wizard of Oz was released in 1939 — with special effects that were truly amazing for its time, given that the SFX team creating the tornado had never seen one and had no footage to go on — people around the world have been fascinated by the twisters of the American Midwest. But how often do you hear about tornadoes anywhere else?
Granted, Tornado Alley doesn’t have a monopoly even in the United States (or northern Mexico and southern Canada, where some folks say the alley ends on each side), but did you know that tornadoes aren’t only an American phenomenon? “It just seemed so astonishing to see a twister in Lancashire,” said one British onlooker after a storm in 2005. “I thought these things only happened in Kansas.’’
Turns out that Britain has quite a few — though they’re usually weak, tornadoes hit more often per square mile in the UK (and the Netherlands) than they do in the US! Countries where tornadoes are often spotted include France, Germany, India, Bangladesh (where a 1989 event killed 1,300), southern Russia, Japan, China, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and South Africa. A quick mental map will show that we’ve already hopped around both hemispheres, and every continent but Antarctica.
Why don’t we hear more about them? Well, North American readers don’t get much news from other parts of the world, especially weather news, unless an event is extremely unusual or kills a lot of people (like the 1989 Bangladesh tornado). Many countries have large, sparsely populated regions where tornadoes are not reported. Some do not have a strong emphasis on weather reporting and analysis.
If American readers need a somewhat dubious point of pride, however, the US has many more reported tornadoes (by an order of magnitude) and generally stronger tornadoes than anywhere else.
That’s one geographic myth down. Here’s another: Because large buildings affect weather patterns, tornadoes don’t usually hit major cities — or at least their downtowns.
I believed this one for years; I have connections in Chicago, near the northern end of America’s Tornado Alley, and while twisters were not uncommon out in the suburbs, you hardly ever heard of them in or near the city limits. Some researchers speculated that heat-island effects of cities (more pavement, less vegetation makes cities warmer than surrounding areas), like large structures, were protective, so I patted myself on the back thinking we were safe.
But residents of several American cities can tell you different. Not counting tornadoes which went through areas other than a central business district (such as the awful tornadoes of Worcester, MA in 1953 and Oklahoma City in 1999): Nashville has been hit multiple times. In less than a century, St. Louis, Missouri had four fatal tornadoes in the downtown area alone. (Windsor, Ontario — across the river from Detroit — also had four in that stretch of time, though the fourth had no fatalities.)
In the last decade and change, Miami, Detroit, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Fort Worth, New Orleans, and Atlanta have all had twisters roar through downtown.
The real science behind the myth is statistical: downtowns are usually much more compact than surrounding city and suburban regions. If you have a city of two hundred square miles, and its central business district is two square miles (units are illustrative; substitute sq km if you like), the downtown has a 1% chance of being struck by a tornado inside the city limits. (You can do the same math with a city itself and its surrounding metro area.)
But despite the “it can’t happen here, because it hasn’t” crowd, even Chicago’s Loop has been hit, back in the pre-skyscraper era. In 1876, an F3 came to town, merrily knocking over buildings and leaving death and destruction in its wake. Imagine something like the Oklahoma City tornado (an F5 up to a mile wide) roaring through an area as population-dense as today’s Loop!
Actually, in 2007, researchers in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society did just that, visualizing an intense tornado in downtown Chicago. They estimated that in dense residential sections up to 45,000 deaths could occur, and such a tornado could destroy 239,000 housing units and cause “substantial damage to over 400,000 homes occupied by over 1,100,000 people”; “permanent structural damage” could happen in “a broad area of the high-rise office and apartment districts”. Now isn’t that cheery news?
So no, many of us are not in Kansas anymore, but that doesn’t mean we’re safe as houses in the Emerald City. Be careful out there.
So, the squeaky clean image of the much talented, admired and adored Tiger Woods has forever been erased 640-460. As usual, when confronted by yet another life filled with bad behavior 640-553, people are defending this abuser of marriage and society. The excuses are piling up 640-802. People are even attacking his wife.
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