This afternoon over lunch hour at the plant I stepped outside and saw a rotating wall cloud just a few miles west. It is unusual for tornadoes to form this close to the mountains. I’ll admit that I was disappointed to not witness an actual funnel.
At about the same time 15 miles NW near my home, a funnel cloud was spotted. From that location, my daughter reported that fellow middle school students were huddled under their desks for an hour waiting for the storm to pass. Another 15 miles north, my wife was busy herding elementary school students under their desks in what they call the “squat and scream” position. Sadly, a nearby town suffered a strike by a tornado that resulted in one fatality and a bunch of heavily damaged homes.
Imagine if the area that comprises what we refer to as the Middle East was an area that suffered tornado activity. That would be the area from Lebanon to Iran to Egypt. It is fun to speculate how the Abrahamic religions might be filled with parables and stories detailing the wrath of God through the agency of a tornado.
Perhaps the exodus of the Israelites might have been aided by the thrashing of Pharaoh with a tornado rather than drowning as the parting seas collapsed. Or colorful tornado-related dream accounts of the end times in the New Testament’s Electric Koolaid Acid Trip of the Book of Revelations.
After the excitement it was back to business. Work is a seemingly endless carnival of intractable problems and sticky layers of nuance.
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Lamentations on Chemistry 
Glad to hear everyone made it through alright. Some of the worst storms I have been in were on the plains just east of Fort Fun. We used to go up to the Horsetooth overlook and watch the storms develop. Hollywood couldn’t even dream of the light show that would unfold almost every evening during the summer.
Have a great Holiday!
I was thinking that tornadoes are a uniquely North American phenomenon, (nearly true, as most of them do occur here), but the Netherlands appears to have the highest density of tornadoes (tornadoes/area). Of course if Luxembourg or San Marino ever got a tornado, the record books would need a rewrite.
I’ve always had a very hard time explaining to the non-scientific laiety the difficulty in predicting tornadoes, in large part because of the small scale of the winds. The storms can be 50 miles wide while the whirlwind is most commonly just a few hundred feet wide. That’s a scale difference of 1500x.
With each passing year, I am more committed to chasing one of these bad boys some day.
(I think I need to get a new perspective. Too many posts here on scale and getting old.)
OK. I’ll try to write more upbeat posts.
“OK. I’ll try to write more upbeat posts.”
Actually, the tone is in tune with the times. The only way it could get worse is Bush formulating a national emergency to dissolve congress and stay on another term, heck why not emperor for life. More likely, if Obama looks like a shoe-in the US war/oil complex will terminate him before the election.
This country is now a banana republic.