In 1925 a tornado ripped through Griffin, Indiana, midway through a 219-mile-long killing spree. There’s some question today whether the tornado was a single twister or a series of them, but 689 people died that day and thousands more were injured–so if it was one tornado it was certainly the worst ever recorded in U.S. history.
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With tornado watches and warnings flashing onto the television regularly every spring and summer, my parents established that the safest spot in the house to wait it out was underneath the staircase in a triangular space where the camping gear was stored. Sometimes I snuck into it for practice, carrying a flashlight and crackers and carving out a nest for myself among the sleeping bags.
The other day I talked with Stu Ostrow, a meteorologist with the Weather Channel who’d just come back from chasing tornadoes across the Great Plains. The Weather Channel is producing a documentary, not on tornadoes but–in a rather self-referential move–on the people who track them. It turns out there’s a whole subculture of people who drop what they’re doing whenever there’s a great storm brewing and drive or fly to it in the hope of seeing a funnel cloud drop to earth. Some are scientists, some hope to sell video or photos to the media, and some are just tornado junkies. “There’s a fine line between being in the right place at the right time and being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Stu admitted.
We may feel braver in the face of nature when most of what surrounds us is made by humans, but in reality much of our urban environment would be used against us by a tornado. A 200-mile-an-hour wind tosses trucks into cottonwood trees and collapses buildings on top of innocent people, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.
