A hurricane for all seasons
While we would not wish to distract anyone currently trying to outrun a T.
Rex, we do want to alert you to a singularly deadly windstorm that must surely furnish conclusive proof of man-made climate change in all its horror.
No, not the somnolent Atlantic hurricane season finally producing a lone, albeit hellish Hurricane Helene. Rather, from Cody Cassidy’s gripping How to Survive History, (and we mention the T.
Rex because the subtitle is How to Outrun a Tyrannosaurus, Escape Pompeii, Get Off the Titanic, and Survive the Rest of History’s Deadliest Catastrophes), we bring you the off-the-scale, 300 mph town-leveling, locomotive-hurling “Tri-State Tornado” of… wait… what’s this?
March 18, 1925? Yes indeed, nearly a century ago. And you’d better run. Or better yet, hide. Especially if you’re one of those people who says the weather is so obviously way worse today than ever in the past that the science is settled.
Cassidy’s book really is a delight to read, if you don’t mind things like the Chicxulub asteroid impact raining down blazing glass-like rock chunks on all the Earth’s forests at over 100 mph.
(Hint: you need to hide in a cave on the other side of the world and well above sea level because of the tsunamis.) But it won’t convince you that climate was benign until recently. Including this tornado.
Evidently it masked its own approach because it was so huge and ferocious that it looked more like a rainstorm… until you heard its unearthly shriek “that one witness later describes as ‘a whistling, siren-like death song’” by which point it was too late.
And as Cassidy writes, it was a “meteorological freak” in every way. While on average tornadoes last for under 10 minutes, Tri-state lasted over three and a half hours and traveled 219 miles across (hence the name) three states, both of which are all-time records:
“And while the average tornado advances at 30 mph, when the Tri-State tornado crossed the Mississippi River and smacked into Gorham [IL], it was moving at an astonishing 73 miles per hour – the fastest in recorded history.
On the Enhanced Fujita scale, which meteorologists use to classify a tornado’s power, a maximum EF 5 designation signifies sustained wind velocities of at least 200 miles per hour.
Fewer than 1 percent of tornadoes ever attained this speed. Tri-State dwarfed it. At its height, Tri-State’s winds exceeded 300 mph.”
You can imagine the devastation. Or maybe not, so we’ll keep quoting:
“Even among the rarest, most catastrophic weather events that can occur on earth, Tri-State stands above. It peeled pavement, unzipped railroad track, hurled hundred-ton locomotives, tossed tractors into homes, and splintered nearly every building it touched.
It cut a mile-wide gash through southern Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, and killed at least 695 people – double the death toll of the second deadliest tornado in American history.”
Warming to his theme, he gushes on that:
“The Tri-State Tornado holds every significant tornadic record that a twisted cloud could ever hope to accomplish. It’s the Secretariat of tornadoes, and southwestern Illinois was the backstretch of its Belmont.
If young clouds hung posters on their walls, they would be shots of the Tri-State supercell as it crossed the Mississippi. There may not be, in the recorded history of atmospheric wrath, a single more ominous site than the shrieking black fog you see from the window of the Gorham train station at 2:30 that March afternoon.”
Run! Or something (not including jumping in your Model T as he warns that they do not perform well in high winds).
Here we will mention as a genuinely practical matter that as with all tornadoes, the greatest risk was from flying debris turned deadly.
If a storm throws a tractor at you the danger is obvious. But winds that can drive a plank 16 inches into a tree, as Tri-State did, can convert anything from a nail to a wood splinter into a deadly weapon.
So it’s essential to get as many layers of protection as possible between you and any such lethal hail of mundane objects including, he says, putting the stoutest pot you can find over your head if you lack a safety helmet, and climbing into a bathtub if no safe cellar is available.
Speaking of putting things over your head, in this case tinfoil, while reading his description and, if you follow up, his account of the freak conditions that created this monster, including a swerving jet stream (yes
Before “climate change”) mixing hot dry Mexican air, cool wet Gulf air and frigid Canadian tundra air in such a way as to create an “atmospheric pipe bomb” of about the worst sort imaginable, you have only to think what the global warming zealots would say if it happened today.
The “attribution science” fortune-tellers would look up from their digital tea leaves, shake their heads and mutter that it could not have happened without our carbon sins.
The media would find experts to say that while it is of course not possible to link any one event to climate change we will undoubtedly see more flying trains as burning fossil fuels continues to heat the planet.
After all, when Hurricane Beryl was hyped as “the strongest hurricane to hit the southernmost Windward Islands on record” except we noted snidely for the Great Hurricane of 1780, which reportedly gusted to over 200 mph (320 km/h), we were told that:
“Earlier this year, some scientists argued that a category six was now needed to account for the strength of climate-change induced hurricanes.
With studies showing tropical storms are becoming more intense, the traditional five-category Saffir-Simpson scale, developed more than 50 years ago, may not show the true power of the most muscular storms.
Five monster storms in the Pacific since 2013 have had winds of 308 kilometres per hour or higher that would have put them in the new category. And though no Atlantic hurricane has reached this threshold yet, experts say as the world warms the environment for such a storm grows more conducive.”
Riiight. And when Tri-State breaks all known tornado records, including gusting to over 300 mph (482 km/h) and ignorantly does it in 1925, it is proof that um uh well see we that is to say.
P.S. It’s less practical than the bathtub-cooking-pot-watch-out-for-the-train thing, but if you are trying to outrun a T. Rex the trick evidently is not to sprint but to turn frequently, and hope it lumbers past and gets bored.
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