Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [49]
The first sight of a tornado is its funnel shape. It always seems to be striking downward at the earth, but this is an illusion. Tornadoes do form from the top down, but they aren't visible until they pick up debris from the ground—what you actually see is a grotesque mixture of earth, shrubs, fragments of trees, window glass, household effects, flying barns, bits of houses, whole cows, even car bodies and sheets of plywood and metal roofing. Their forward speed is usually around 30 or 36 miles an hour, but they can be nearly static or move well over 60 miles an hour. Their paths are usually narrow, no more than several hundred yards and sometimes less. Length varies widely from not very much to dozens of miles. The 1925 Missouri twister was huge, 9 miles wide and more than 180 miles long. A series of tornadoes crossed Grand Island, Nebraska, in June 1980 at a stately 4.8 miles an hour; the path of the final one included two complete 360-degree circles—the damn thing just would not go away. Five people were killed. On April 22, 2004, a tornado roared through Utica, Illinois, killing eight residents who had taken shelter in the local tavern. "The sky turned purple and then the air screamed," said one of the survivors, Mary Paulak. "It sounded like a woman shrieking with rage."30 The storm had struck too quickly for residents to react. There had been fifty-one reports of tornadoes the previous day, and everyone was nervous, but this one came without any warning whatever.
As usual with tornadoes, there were anomalies in its 200-yard-wide path of destruction. One house had its back walls sheared right off, but a small cluster of cheerful orange tulips at the front porch was untouched.31 Anomalies, curiosities, quirks—these are the nature of tornadoes. Almost every twister leaves behind some curious fact—a children's doll driven feet-first into the trunk of a tree, but otherwise undamaged; the whole roof of a house, still intact with its gables and gutters, five hundred yards from the house it once adorned; a car containing two children hurled into the air and back to the ground, the children miraculously unhurt; a house demolished, the one next door, a mere three feet away, untouched; blades of straw embedded in fence posts; a schoolhouse with eighty-five pupils inside demolished and the children carried one hundred and fifty yards, unharmed but seriously frightened; five railway coaches, each weighing seventy tons, moved thirty yards . . .
A 1985 tornado in Barrie, Ontario, sheared a house in half, peeling it open like a doll's house. After it had passed, an ironing board was still standing in an upstairs bedroom, the iron still on it, as though ready for use. Of course I had seen for myself in Johannesburg how by cruel fate a twister had unfairly mirrored the apartheid system by demolishing the quarters of a black servant, leaving the main house and its white residents more or less intact, and how a little wooden clothespin, made of soft wood and a short length of twisted wire, had been driven hard into a tree. I'd also seen the aftereffects of a tornado that had passed through an oasis near Timbuktu in Mali in 1999, leaving the poorly constructed mud-built houses undamaged, but tearing out by the roots all the date palms, the reason for the community's existence. Leaving the houses alone was doubly unfair—they were of no further use. Less than a week after it had happened, the entire oasis was deserted. No repair crews were working away, no builders, no gardeners or planters, no herdsmen or householders. The oasis was empty, abandoned. The houses had been stripped, the camels moved off. Everyone had left.
Some of these anomalies are caused by smaller