SilentRealm said:
Thanks guys! As you can see, I'm here so our town got through ok. It upgraded to a category 5 overnight but hit a smaller town just to the north and absolutely decimated it (literally half the town was flattened), so poor them.
Ouch. Is that Innisfail you're talking about?
That sounds like what happened to some of the little towns along the Mississippi coastline...Waveland got flattened pretty bad, too.
I found out a pretty scary fact, when I did some reading about hurricanes and cyclones. For the rest of us here in the U.S./Latin America, remember that it takes a higher wind speed for a cyclone to reach Category 5 in the Pacific, than it does in this area! YIKES!
yeah see cyclones I can handle, never been in an earthquake (been in a pretty intense tremor but I dont think that would count, I thought it was cool) but unless the ground opens up and eats me I think I can handle that, but tornadoes I'm terrified of! Are they as scary as you'd think?
I've only seen a little "baby" of a tornado, once when I was in Arizona. It was out in the middle of nowhere, a good safe distance from our car, nowhere near anything inhabited. So, it was actually pretty fun to watch. We'd been looking at dust devils, and noticed one that was white. Then we realized it went up to a cloud. And then we figured out, "oh, it's a tornado!" It was a little one, though, and went away not long after we noticed it.
Some tornados won't do much more than take some shingles off your house (that little one we saw, for instance, probably didn't have much more punch to it than a Category 1 hurricane). Others are huge monsters.
I would much rather worry about tornadoes than hurricanes. I may be wrong, but I would suspect that even in some of the most tornado-prone parts of the U.S., the odds of having my house destroyed by a tornado are less than the odds of having your house hit by a hurricane, in a hurricane-prone area.
Also, I'd worry much more about encountering a tornado where you live, than where I am. We have pretty good warning systems in the Southeast, and they've gotten to where sometimes, you get as much as 1/2 hour's warning of an incoming tornado. You don't always get that much time, but if you've lived in this area long enough, you know how to handle it. My dad did storm-chasing when he was younger in one of the worst tornado areas in the country. He's so used to it that a few times I've seen him be able to spot the warning signs in the clouds even before it gets picked up on radar and the sirens go off. So what scares me is having one hit in an area that doesn't have tornado sirens, like where you live. Probably it's most comparable to living in an area where there's a tsunami threat but there's a good warning system (like Japan).
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