Friday, January 1, 2016

The Tornado Damage in Garland, Texas



America gets most of the world's tornadoes because of its unique geography so it's hard for Euros to get a perspective on what these things do.  Here at the Rockhouse, we have an excellent grip on that because Garland, Texas, couldn't be more than fifty miles from here.

The tornado warning was for the entire Dallas / Fort Worth area and the unique thing about tornadoes is how they can strike anywhere.  Even more unusual is a house only a block away may escape any damage whatsoever.  Tornadoes wreak highly-focused carnage and, the picture shows, whatever they hit gets obliterated.

When you watch a cloud with the potential for a tornado, you can see the tunnel form and start to descend.  Not all of them will come to ground and instead will retreat back to the cloud.  So you watch to see which way is it going.  There has never been a time when one was coming toward me and you see above what happens when one does.

Here's the beauty part:  sometimes tornadoes can be one mile across and there is a report the biggest ever observed was about two miles across.  Usually they are much more narrow than that but, either way, they will destroy the hell out of anything they touch.  I've seen tree trunks, perhaps a foot thick, which weren't just broken by a tornado but rather they were twisted into breaking and just imagine how much power it would take to do that.

Yah, so in Texas head for the bathtub!

Odd that tornadoes come at this time and such a hell of a damn shame for these people and their families to get whacked right after Christmas.


Usually tornadoes come in Spring so blame this on:

a) climate change
b) the Mothmen
c) Obama

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