Deadly Days

No matter how hard I try, I don't believe I could ever emphasize how good our area has it when it comes to weather.  We experience a little bit of everything but rarely anything to the extreme.  Thousands of people throughout the south awake to a more peaceful Sunday to complete destruction.

Spring outbreaks are a concern every season as instability in the atmosphere and the jet stream combine to form a deadly combination.  The last two days have shown just how potent these ingredients combined can become.  In the past two days there have been over 200 reported tornadoes (not actual number) and even worse, a death toll approaching 50.

The outbreak started on Thursday with Oklahoma seeing the majority of the tornadoes.  By Friday, Alabama and Mississippi were hit hard.  (Map Below.  Red circle indicates tornado report)

 

Sometimes words and pictures don't do any justice for those of us not use to this type of weather.  In the video below from multiple cameras at a hardware store in Theodore, Alabama, watch how quickly things change (no volume). 

 

Watching this a few times, the first thing you realize is these folks are very lucky.  The second thing, and the one that is so crucial to better understanding tornadoes is that they had no clue this was coming.

In the first camera angle it looks like the customer initially notices the door flying open which prompts the employee to quickly check it out.  In the second angle we see the same scenario as the first but also notice a man behind the desk, leaning back on a chair like it was another normal day in this small Alabama town.  The flickering lights and racket get him up as well as the first employee darts out of camera range and the lady quickly backpedals behind the desk.   In almost unison, all three at the 27 second mark make a move to look back out the door.  One second later the tornado hits.  And nothing reveals how unaware they were then seeing the man at the end still sitting and working as the storms blows through the store.

And this is in Alabama.  A place that deals with this kind of weather quite frequently.  Without volume it's hard to know what kind if any warnings were being sent out.  Reactions suggest there were none.  By the way, this was an EF2 on the Fujita scale, suggesting winds were between 115 and 135 miles per hour.  Had it been stronger, this video would have recorded something far worse. 

That is how these become so deadly.  People are caught completely off guard.  With virtually every other type of weather related disaster, there is some form of advanced warning.  With tornadoes you get virtually zero.  The weather service can put out as many watches as possible, but warnings only appear when a tornado is either spotted or viewed visually on radar.  That gives people all of what, an average of 5 to 10 minutes?  And if sirens aren't sounded, radios or televisions aren't on, and people are going about their lives, how would you ever know?

North Carolina was the target on Saturday with a reported 90 tornadoes.  The state average per year is less than 20.  At last check roughly half the deaths from this outbreak occurred in the state.  Raleigh dodge the massive tornado that was estimated to be one to two miles wide, however I haven't seen reports of the strength on that particular one.  There are many videos out there since most of these storms occurred during the day, in higher populated areas, with various elevation changes.  I was caught by the location the Weather Channel kept checking in from.  It was from a residential section of a town I can't recall.  Mike Bettes stood in front of two homes, one of which had actually shifted completely off the foundation leaving the two cars in the garage sitting out in the open.  The other was a pile of rubble.  The houses right next door, across the street and in the development behind, suffered no more than some minor structural damage.  The residents in the house left in rubble were not home as they were attending a child's soccer game.  It just goes to show how truly unpredictable these events are.  Not only do we not know where they will form but don't know which direction they will move.  

So the next time you feel like complaining about our weather, realize how great it actually is.