Macabre Monday: Terror with a Twist

From eerie serpentine ropes to colossal rain wrapped wedges to the infamous Dead Man Walking, no other weather phenomenon instills the same sense of primal fear as tornadoes.

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I want to be clear before we begin this that I’m in no way an expert on tornadoes or tornadic activity. While I find these phenomena to be fascinating and have studied a small amount of geology and meteorology in college, this was not a path of study I pursued long term. My interest in these things is purely on the amateur level and as such I should not be considered an authority on this subject in any sense. However, if you’re interested in learning more of the science behind tornadoes and other forms of severe weather, or if you just appreciate the beauty and power of such things, I highly recommend the following YouTube channels. There are many good ones out there, but these four happen to be my personal favorites in this respect:

Pecos Hank (most photos used here are his) | Reed Timmer | Alferia | Swegle Studios

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“An ancient Native American legend speaks of the ‘Dead Man Walking.’ If you see him in a tornado, you are about to die. The townsfolk of Jarrell can now see the arms and legs of a multi-vortex tornado approaching. The Dead Man has just walked into Jarrell.”
1999 Jarrell Texas F5 Documentary

There is little argument to be made that tornadoes are among the most fascinating and awe inspiring of all the severe weather phenomena that can occur on our planet. These colossal funnels of swirling wind; be they the alien looking ropes, massive and terrifying wedges, or the classic funnel with which all of us - even those who haven’t seen them in person - are at least somewhat familiar with; have a strange beauty to them which commands our attention. And who can blame us for being fascinated? Tornadoes stand apart from every other natural disaster in how we can fully perceive them. Or, at the very least, we think we can. But with that fascination comes a primal sense of fear, one that we can sometimes ignore until we realize too late just how close this lethal danger has come.

Statistically speaking, tornadoes are very far from the most deadly natural disasters we encounter. Historically speaking floods and droughts were the deadliest we’d face outside of epidemic illnesses, while nowadays the top spot belongs to major earthquakes and the tsunamis that can sometimes result from them. Hurricanes also tend to be more deadly, due in no small part to the flooding that results from them, and a slower moving hurricane with lower wind speeds can sometimes prove more dangerous than bigger categories that move along their paths more quickly for this reason. Compared to these, tornadoes barely hold a candle in terms of lives taken and damage done,¹ and this is thanks to the fact that the overwhelming majority of them occur in isolated rural areas across the span of the American Midwest known as Tornado Alley.

Awe inspiring as they are, particularly photogenic funnels like this one, tornadoes are often less deadly than many other natural disasters due to the more limited areas they impact. However, less deadly does not mean they’re less dangerous, as some of history’s more harrowing tornado stories tell us.
Photo by Pecos Hank.

But with it being the case that many other forms of natural disaster are statistically more deadly, why is it that we don’t see the same primal senses of awe and fear for hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and fires that we do for tornadoes? Well, to put it far too simply, it’s a matter of scale and the different elements that come into play when warning for and witnessing tornadoes. To illustrate the point, I’m going to borrow from a recent video by Swegle Studios which inspired this article. If you like, you can watch it here. The portion I’ll be quoting is the intro to this video.

Picture this scenario:
You’re at home. It’s in the late evening. You’re just hanging out, watching TV, when you hear a clap of thunder in the distance. You get up to look out the window and you notice dark clouds to the west, slowly approaching. The TV program you were watching becomes interrupted by a local weather broadcast warning of the potential of tornadoes.
And suddenly, the tornado sirens sound.
You grab your family, your pets, and you find a safe space. Perhaps it’s in your basement, perhaps it’s in a closet or an interior room. You seek shelter and you begin to hear a low rumble sound, almost like a train, slowly approaching, getting louder, and louder, and louder.

I really do think Swegle put it best when he says that tornadoes are like the slasher villains of natural disasters, able to creep unseen up to your doorstep in the pitch darkness of the middle of a stormy night. What other natural disaster can do that? Almost none of them, save maybe for firestorms, but even those can give a little bit of early warning in the form of light and heat and smoke. They can surprise you, as I well know from living in San Diego County during the 2003 and 2007 firestorms, but not in the same way a tornado can.

Even in the daytime a tornado can be deceptive. Looking at this image of a colossal rain wrapped wedge, can you spot where exactly the tornado’s vortex is hiding? Neither can I.
Photo by Pecos Hank.

However, it’s more than just their ability to sneak up and surprise victims that makes us feel that deep sense of fear when we hear about or see footage of tornadoes. Outside of rare instances like undulating sand waves in the desert, you can’t see an earthquake coming. When you look at an approaching hurricane, it’s impossible to fully grasp the scope of it because of how massive it is. The same often holds true of floods and volcanic eruptions and large wildfires, the scope is too great to comprehend.

The same isn’t true with tornadoes. We can watch them form in the clouds and reach down to scour the earth beneath them as they travel.

We can watch them change shape and size and speed, and sometimes we can even see the massive mesocyclones that comprise the supercell storms which often spawn them swirling high above.

And as if that wasn’t enough, sometimes we can see them form in pairs or watch as a single tornado births multiple vortexes, such as that infamous picture of the Dead Man Walking from the devastating Jarrell TX F5 tornado of 1997, which you saw at the start of the article.

As before, excluding the Jarrell Dead Man Walking, all of these pictures were taken by Pecos Hank. Seriously, if these aren’t enough to sell you on his YouTube channel, I’m not sure what could. But back to the topic at hand. Swegle compares tornadoes to stalking slasher villains, which is an assessment I certainly agree with in the proper context, such as tornadoes hidden from sight by heavy rains or the cover of darkness. However, this isn’t a proper assessment in all contexts, because sometimes you can see them. You can see their scale, their massive height, the way they reach down from the sky and tower over you and can approach much faster than you’d ever realize if you were at all ignorant of how fast these things can move.²

Think about it. We just compared these things to slasher movie villains. Well, what other icons from film fit the bill of a tornado: towering in their height and sometimes colossal in their size, cutting swathes of destruction along their paths, and capable of destroying entire neighborhoods, towns, or even sizable sections of large cities when the get powerful enough? There’s only one type of movie monster I can think of that fits that image.

When kaiju movies use their monsters as entities of rampant destruction, it’s commonplace for us to refer to them as forces of nature. Well, I would argue a tornado is the real thing when it comes to that, a towering force of destruction that can and will try to tear through everything in its path. Tornadoes are, in many ways, the real world version of a kaiju.

However, while I am making a comparison to movie monsters to help try to encapsulate why we find tornadoes such a uniquely scary natural disaster, I don’t want anyone reading this to think that I’m taking their power and the damage they can do lightly. Tornadoes are singularly responsible for the highest wind speeds ever recorded on this planet, and when they reach those higher velocities they’re fully capable of ripping even the most well constructed buildings to pieces, leaving only foundations behind. Make no mistake, they may not have the same kind of massive reach and power of an earthquake, but these are still deadly and destructive weather events that can, have, and will cost people and communities their homes, their livelihoods, and their lives.

I don’t normally do this sort of thing, but given the subject matter I’m about to broach it seems appropriate in this case. I’m going to share a couple more pictures from the 1997 Jarrell F5 tornado, including some pictures of the damage caused to the Double Creek Estates subdivision. This is human cost we’ll be looking at, the destruction caused by a tornado that injured 12 and killed 27. If you feel looking at these will be uncomfortable for you, you’re more than welcome to stop reading here. This next section exists to further solidify the point made by demonstrating it in terms of the reality of what can happen, but it isn’t necessary to understand what I’ve already said.

For those of you still here, the Jarrell F5 is one of those rare tornadoes that was documented from almost its inception and showed a tornado entirely changing its form as it developed. Initially, it started as a skinny rope tornado that appeared like it would be quite weak. There was even a point at which the vortex weakened enough that people thought it might be over then and there. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case, and after that brief moment where it weakened that skinny rope suddenly started to pick up speed.

This is what that skinny rope turned into, a large, dark wedge with a minimum peak windspeed of 260 MPH (418 KMH). The multiple vortices of the Dead Man Walking were spied within this mighty black monster shortly before it entered the town, and while it narrowly avoided the town’s center, the Double Creek Estates subdivision was unfortunately directly in its path.

This aerial shot shows what remained of the subdivision after the tornado passed through. As you can see, there is nothing left. Homes were leveled down to the foundation. Cars were picked up and tossed like toys. Trees had the bark scoured off of them before they were ripped to splinters. Roof tiles and other softer building materials were atomized in the high winds. Yet as shocking as this is, for me personally, the most stunning display of the tornado’s power is in the path it took, which is made visible boy the scouring of the ground beneath it.

We are very lucky to be able to say that tornadoes cause damage of this scale as rarely as they do. I shudder to imagine how bad it would be if they had an impact area akin to that of the most powerful earthquakes or floods. However, regardless of how comparatively limited the damage of the most powerful tornadoes are, it’s impossible to deny how shockingly impactful it is to witness, even just through photos and videos. As someone who’s never seen the destruction of a tornado firsthand, I struggle to imagine how frightening it must be in the moment for those who hear the howling winds and the train-like rumble of these incredible storms.

The only thing I can liken destruction like this to are the burnt homes I witnessed after the San Diego County Cedar Fire in 2003. The memory of driving through Crest, a small mountain neighborhood not more than 20 minutes from where I live now, and seeing house after house burnt to its foundation save for the entirely random handful that hadn’t been claimed; or of driving through Harbison Canyon only to see everything blackened and charred; are the closest I can possibly get to understanding what it must be like in the wake of a tornado that does manage to impact a home, a community, a neighborhood, or a town.

Tornadoes are awe inspiring and beautiful in their own way. I’ve marveled at them ever since I was a little kid, and I still marvel at them today. I’ve never felt the kind of nervousness that comes from having my phone or TV screech out a National Weather Service tornado alert, nor the fear that follows when those eerie sounding sirens go off. But I feel like I can at least imagine some of it, if only for still remembering how that knot of dread in my own stomach felt when I saw the Cedar Fire climb to the top of the hill adjacent to the one my family’s house was on.

Tornadoes may not be the deadliest natural disasters around, but there isn’t a doubt in my mind that they’re the most frightening to witness.

1. The deadliest tornado of the last 20 years is the Joplin, Missouri EF5 from May 22nd, 2011. This 200+ MPH (320+ KMH) tornado took the lives of 158 people, with three indirect fatalities to follow. Compared to the deadliest earthquake of the last 20 years, the Port-au-Prince Haiti quake of 2010 which clamed which claimed approximately 316,000 lives, and we start to see how the wider impact area of other disasters can lead them to be far deadlier.

2. Average ground speed ranges from 10-20 MPH/16-32 KMH, but tornadoes can very easily reach speeds of up to 60 MPH/96 KMH or higher. That said, they can also be nearly stationary, thus adding to the unpredictability of these severe weather events.