Confessions of a Tornado Junkie

It is finally Tornado Week on The Weather Channel. I went home last night and spent a couple of hours in front of the TV, watching Storm Stories: episodes about storm chasers, about tour groups which specialize in following severe weather, and about people with way too close encounters with tornadoes.

Confession: I am a secret tornado junkie.

I watch The Weather Channel especially for the severe weather updates.

I secretly long to be a NOAA spotter.

I know the Storm Prediction Center’s web address by heart (http://spc.noaa.gov/ ). I actually read the Mesoscale Discussions on the website.

I can tell you the Latin name of the strange clouds that sometimes precede a tornado (cumulonimbus mammatus).

I can tell you that the southeast corner of a thunderstorm is most likely to produce tornadoes.

I am familiar with both the Fugita and Enhanced Fugita Scale.

I can spot a hook echo on Doppler radar.

I actually own a weather radio.

I realize that this obsession is a little weird. I didn’t grow up in a tornado-plagued part of the country. Connecticut isn’t exactly in Tornado Alley. I am both terrified and fascinated by tornadoes.

I blame it on The Wizard of Oz, which was broadcast on network television at least once a year when I was a kid. Forget the flying monkeys; it was that tornado in the black and white portion of the movie, at the beginning, that would send me scurrying to hide behind the couch in the living room. I would have nightmares in which, like Dorothy, I struggled to get somewhere safe, away from the twister, but couldn’t (I still occasionally have that nightmare. I’ve researched the hidden implications of that dream scenario- more on that in a later post).

In elementary school, I checked out the same book over and over: Hurricanes and Tornadoes. I skipped past the hurricane descriptions and pictures- those were boring. I had already been through a hurricane: my neighborhood was struck by what my parents said was the tail end of Hurricane Belle. I imagined it as some kind of big dragon with a big tail that whipped around and smacked North Haven. It uprooted a tiny sapling on the side of the house, but that was about it (Sixteen years later, my encounter with Hurricane Andrew was not so benign).

My real interest, in Hurricanes and Tornadoes, were the black and white plates in the center of the book. I pored over the pictures of the monster funnels and of their aftermath: two by fours driven through trees, upside down houses and cars. I imagined my own house, flattened to bits.

Florida, where we relocated in the late 1970s, is more of a hotbed for tornado activity. Actually, it’s pretty much right up there with the Midwest in the number and intensity of tornadoes. As the years went by, I became a little less frightened of bad weather. Tornado watches and warnings were common, but I only witnessed a rare, harmless funnel cloud or two, F0 storms, and a few benign waterspouts.

I saw my first real tornado at the age of 27, in a very unlikely place: downtown Miami, FL. The infamous Miami Tornado of 1997.