Word: tornado
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...feel under siege with this weather," my friend Anne e-mailed this week, after reassuring me that her 15-year-old son was not among the Boy Scouts at an Iowa campground that was flattened by a tornado a few days ago. It was hard to react to that unfathomable tragedy - four teenagers killed, 48 people wounded - with the can-do stoicism that many Iowans have mustered in response to the sinking realization that yet another so-called "500-year flood" is slowly but surely swamping our state - just 15 years after the last...
...days, the American Midwest has endured bands of slow-moving thunderstorms that have unleashed massive tornadoes and caused dams to fail. At least four people were killed as a tornado tore through a Boy Scout camp in the remote hills of western Iowa Wednesday. An entire Wisconsin lake has emptied. Carp are swimming through suburban Milwaukee streets. An Iowa farmer has drowned in his own field. And the havoc is expected to continue, with more bizarre weather and even an alert about a mini-tsunami on Lake Michigan in Chicago. What next? Twisters down Michigan Avenue? Don't scoff...
Last weekend, tornadoes swept through Cook County, which includes Chicago. As a barbecue began on this city's North Side Saturday afternoon, the sky turned the color of charcoal and the wind quickened. One man burst through a door announcing that a tornado had been reported nearby. "Whatever," another man said dismissively, holding a Corona, before adding, "We can't get tornadoes here." Not so. Major cities with skyscrapers aren't less vulnerable to tornadoes than rural, flat areas. Consider the tornadoes that swept through downtown Atlanta and parts of New Orleans earlier this year, and the series of deadly...
Some blowhards with pulpits insist on attributing acts of God to the sins of the victims, but recent days have provided awful reminders that natural disasters don't discriminate. A cyclone killed 50,000 in Burma; an earthquake killed 15,000 in China; a tornado killed seven in Picher, Okla. The only generalization that can be made about all the victims is that they were unfortunate. As it says in the Book of Matthew, "God sendeth rain on the just and the unjust...
...expose the city's pre-existing poverty, the unwise destruction of its wetlands defenses and the dysfunction of the agencies that built its levees and responded to the storm. By contrast, the rebuilding of Greensburg, Kans., as an environmentally sustainable town after it was flattened by a tornado a year ago reflected American resilience and ingenuity. Hurricanes and tornadoes are random events, but preparations and responses...