Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [47]
The second encounter was in Arizona. I was at a conference of magazine editors, meeting in one of those gloomy, subterranean hotel conference rooms, when the lights abruptly went off. I remember it mostly because a publisher was whining about the ingratitude of her editor, and the rest of the assembled editors clearly felt the lights going out meant god was on their side, but then they came on again, and the discussion, such as it was, resumed. Outside . . . no more than five hundred yards from the hotel, a tornado had torn through. We were stunned at the proximity and the extent of the damage. The storm had ripped a path through town, leaving behind a ghastly jumble of mangled cars and demolished billboards, road signs, and small buildings. A pole with a traffic light still attached was poking out through the ruined windshield of a pickup truck. By some miracle, no one had been killed.
The third was in Ontario, which gets few tornadoes. At that time we owned some woodlands in the Ontario deciduous forest belt, and one day, when we were away in the city, a tornado tore through the woods not far from our cabin, so we saw it only by its results. Its path was peculiar, not uncommon with tornadoes. The whole thing seemed to have begun and ended on our small property. It tore through the forest for no more than a few hundred yards, but while it was there, it demolished a straight line of maples and beeches. It didn't just knock them over, as a hurricane would have. It tore them right out of the ground, roots and all, and pushed them into an untidy heap. No more than a few feet off its path, the trees were untouched. Even the leaves were still on their branches.
Tornadoes can happen anywhere, but the United States has the dubious honor of being far and away in first place, both in frequency and violence, with Australia an unenthusias-tic runner-up. Other common-enough spots are the Ganges basin of Bangladesh and the Yangtze River valley of China; and I knew for myself that they happened on the great plains of South Africa, and occasionally in central Canada. Tornadoes, formerly just called whirlwinds, or occasionally, typhoons, were not unknown in Europe— Aristotle described a tornado in the handbook he called Meteorologica, and a tornado ruined parts of Rome in 1749. But the champ is America, where the tornado belt, or Tornado Alley, runs in a swath across the Great Plains from north Texas through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Iowa to southern Minnesota. Somewhere between six hundred and one thousand tornadoes touch down in the United States every year. May is generally the worst month. In its results, America's worst tornado was in March 1925, when a twister roared at 60 miles an hour through a series of small mining towns from eastern Missouri to western Indiana, killing 695 people. But in sheer perverse capriciousness, the unfortunate loser has got to be a small town in Kansas called Codell, which was hit by tornadoes three years in a row on exactly the same date, May 20, in 1916, 1917, and 1918. The tornado-free May 20, 1919, must have been rather a big day in town.
Squall lines, no matter how severe, seldom generate tornadoes, nor do normal thunderstorms—neither a squall nor a thunderstorm is a vortex, and to conceive a tornado the mother storm must show at least the beginning of a cyclone effect, a true vortex. The deadliest tornadoes are the creatures of mammoth and long-lived storms called supercells, whose winds are already rotating (they are themselves vortexes, albeit