

Column: Keep Oklahoma in perspective

10:11 AM, May 22, 2013  |  Comments
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During the live coverage of the horrific events in Moore, Okla., on Monday night, meteorologist Mike Morgan on Oklahoma City TV station KFOR declared that this was "the worst tornado damage-wise in the history of the world." Versions of that phrase went on echoing through the national coverage of the disaster that night.

No, this wasn't the absolute worst tornado ever, but there was still something unusually horrible about it. The size and destructiveness were, as writer Andrew Leonard in Salon put it, "unprecedented."

Without minimizing the tragedy of what happened in Moore - where at least 24 people, including nine children, were killed - it's worth putting this disaster in perspective by looking back through history at earlier, worse tornadoes.

Consider for a moment another tornado that happened more than 200 years ago, on the afternoon of June 8, 1805. An enormous black cloud came out of the Missouri hills, crossed the Mississippi River, cut through Southern Illinois, and finally petered out somewhere in Indiana. The land there was heavily forested and sparsely settled. There were few witnesses and fewer reports of injury or property damage. It might have left no trace in history, except for the aftermath. Travelers found an impassable wall of downed trees, 2 miles wide and hundreds of miles long, that remained in place for decades.

Tri-State Tornado

The 1805 tornado might be dismissed as some unrepeatable fluke - except that 120 years later, on March 18, 1925, another tornado traced out almost the exact same route. It became known as the Tri-State Tornado. Witnesses didn't see a classic funnel cloud. Instead, they described it as a wall of fog that moved across the landscape at more than 70 miles an hour, destroying everything it touched. Monday's tornado in Moore lasted 40 minutes. The Tri-State tornado lasted three and a half hours. The country there was no longer uninhabited, as it had been in 1805, and almost 700 people died.

There have been others. The Moore tornado has been reported to be 1.3 miles wide at one point, which is very unusual but not unprecedented. A tornado in Hallam, Neb., in 2004 was measured at two-and-a-half miles wide, and there is radar evidence that a 1999 tornado in the open country of northern Oklahoma was larger.

Even the extraordinary images of complete destruction from Moore will seem familiar to historians of violent weather. The preliminary estimates are that the tornado rated an EF-5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, with winds of about 200 mph, but Moore experienced a tornado in 1999 where the winds were clocked at above 300 mph.

The truth is that tornadoes like this are rare but not unheard of. They have been part of the reality of life in the American heartland for centuries. So why do people have the idea that there is something so horribly sinister about this newest one?

For all to see

Partly, of course, it's the sheer overwhelming violence and terror of the tornado itself, transmitted in real time and viewed over and over again by millions of people on news websites and the Internet. This naturally has the effect of dulling the memory of previous catastrophes.

There is also the current tendency of the news media to treat every meteorological event in apocalyptic terms. But now there is also our growing urgency about climate change. In much of the online discussion about what happened in Moore, we can hear the repeated fear that there's something unnatural going on with the weather, that this one event - and if not this one, then surely the next - will be the tipping point for global disaster.

Among meteorologists, there's widespread consensus climate change is real, but very little concern about what one tornado might or might not prove about it. In the first decade of this century, there were only three EF-5 tornadoes anywhere in North America; nobody knows why. In 2011 alone, there were six.

What should concern us is what a tornado like the one in Moore says about the heedless way we occupy the American landscape. The heartland is being enormously overbuilt. Tornadoes are going to be more frequent occurrences in densely inhabited areas because there are going to be fewer empty places for them to touch down.

Whatever happens to the larger climate, events like Moore are increasingly going to be the norm.

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