I live in a place that gets hurricanes and (rarely) a tornado. Tornadoes seem so much worse. You get a few days notice before a hurricane but a tornado just pops up. The damage is contained but it doesn’t matter if it hits your house.
In recent years we’ve been seeing a scary trend of tornadoes hitting the area overnight. Like at 11:00pm or later. That suuuuccks.
When I was a kid they were almost always a late afternoon or early evening event. Official forecasts were crap, but at least you could look outside and think, “this looks like tornado weather, better check the radio.” Now we’re woken out of sleep in the middle of the night by the simultaneous klaxon of our phone alerts.
They’re also hitting us earlier in the year. My calendar has a repeating reminder for early April: “peak tornado season starts in a few months - start drilling the cats now.” We had one in fucking February this year that took out a barn a few miles down the road.
Living in a place with earthquakes is also suck. You could be fast asleep and suddenly awaken by the shakes and had to evacuate out of the house within seconds. Doubly so if it’s on a shore because you may need to evacuate the area if the quake is large enough to potentially trigger a tsunami. I wonder when we finally have an earthquake version of tornado warning.
I am against earthquakes on principle.
Oddly enough, I just read something today about newly emerging earthquake detection tech. It involved small variations in movement tracked by GPS transmitters, and would give 2 hours (+/-?) before the quake hit. I like the idea of that.
Ted Fujita, the co-author of the Fujita-Pearson Tornado research and FPP intensity scaling (later shortened to just F levels), helped figure out how to describe the conditions for tornado formation which gave us hours of warning. Prior to that a tornado would pop out of nowhere and no one had any idea of how big it was until surveying the damage.
Best wishes to those affected, having your home and livelihood upended like this sucks…
