Twisters

[muckefuck]

When I was young, I was terrified of tornadoes. I guess every Midwestern kid is. Or do we all get traumatised by that early scene in The Wizard of Oz? Here, though, it's reinforced by regular drills at skills and boring hours sitting out tornado watches in the dank of the basement. And the stories--everyone you know has a story about the near miss that happened to them or (more often) a relative. For us, it was the time our great-grandmother came back from going to the bathroom in the middle of the night to find her bed studded with broken glass.

But--as my friends from the Middle East tell me--you can grow accustomed to most anything, and when you've managed to reach your teens without seeing your house swept away, you begin to grow blasé. I mean, I'll never forget my first glimpse of a real "tornado sky"--it's not a green you see in nature any other time--but nothing came of it. The mayhem also seemed to occur in remote areas, to people I had no intercourse with. And the death tolls were always so occasional and so low--not even comparable to the frequent spring floods.

Last week was the first time I can remember that a tornado struck someplace I actually know well. Five days after I flew back from Lambert-St Louis International, it was struck by an EF2 category storm. A neighbouring subdivision where one my high school buddies grew up was devastated; half the houses on his old street are gone. They were calling it a "miracle" that no one was killed, but, really, I think this is the natural result of decades of investment in preparedness. My sister lives barely twenty minutes away, but my only worry on her behalf was that she'd lost power again, as she seems to in every major storm. (She hadn't.)

So this all leaves me all the more stunned by the news from the South. At least three hundred killed? Frankly it's just not at all what I expect in this part of the world at this point in time, and it gives me queegy feelings about the future.

Comments

[my-tallest.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my sister and her wife live in Tuscaloosa, which you just never hear about in the news in the rest of the country. Well, unless it's about the Crimson Tide. Quite a scare. They're OK, but a mile-wide tornado going right through a "downtown" is gonna give queegy feelings to all of us.

Wait Until the Earthquake

[bunj.livejournal.com]

I dread the day New Madrid goes. The Midwest may be prepared for tornadoes, but practically nothing has been done for earthquakes.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I used to feel that way, too. We've been waiting for the "big one" since I was in short pants. Then they revised down the intensity of the historical earthquakes and admitted that they don't really know what they're doing when it comes to making predictions since the New Madrid fault works so differently from others they've studied, like the San Andreas. So now I'm less convinced of its imminence than I used to be.

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

My biggest concern about New Madrid is that the effects of its slips are felt so much further away than anything in the rocky earth of the west coast. A few years ago there was a small New Madrid quake centered somewhere in southern Illinois, IIRC, and my mom said the top floor of her 4-story office building in Traverse City was noticeably swaying from it.

Well this is comforting

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

The concern of seismologists Douglas Wiens and Michael E. Wysession of Washington University in St. Louis, is that the New Madrid Fault may be becoming less active, while activity on the Wabash Fault could be increasing. Wiens states: "I think everyone's interested in the Wabash Valley Fault because a lot of the attention has been on the New Madrid Fault, but the Wabash Valley Fault could be the more dangerous one, at least for St. Louis and Illinois." "The strongest earthquakes in the last few years have come from the Wabash Valley Fault, which needs more investigation."

Re: Well this is comforting

[vamapper.livejournal.com]

We really have no historical record of the New Madrid fault beyond the last 200 years. Both faults are a system of faults from a failed rift that could have split North America up the Mississippi Valley, similar to what is happening in Africa from the triple point near Djibouti and south through the Rift Valleys that created Lake Tanganyika, Lake Malawi, etc. (and will eventually create another island/subcontinent or two like India and Madagascar). Since the New Madrid and Wabash faults aren't very active comparatively and buried under miles of Mississippi Delta sediment, they are very hard to study.

[darkphuque.livejournal.com]

I think that perhaps the number of trailer parks in the south may be larger than in the St Louis area... There is no protection for these residences.

Next Fall we're moving to Tucson AZ and I was told it was seismically inactive... hah! A fault that runs up from Mexico caused a 4.5 quake last year and that fault runs right under Tucson. Danger is all around us.... LOL

I think I was 22 when I felt a 3.0 quake in Chicago.... its bound to happen.

[vamapper.livejournal.com]

I live in St Louis. It's more a matter of basements. Almost everyone in the area has one, other than the obvious trailer park denizens. When I lived in Virginia, a basement was a rarity. When you do find a basement, they are often raised basements where the basement is at ground level with a full story outside stairs going to the main floor.