Word: tornadoes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Most natural disasters strike hard and fast. Tornado, hurricane, earthquake, flash fire and flood all do the worst of their worst in violent bursts and spasms. Droughts are different. They have no discernible beginning; no one wakes up of a morning, looks out a window and says, "Uh-oh, here comes a long dry spell." Droughts seem deceptively serene, no more threatening than an endless expanse of blue, cloudless sky. They unfold in slow motion, a tempo ill suited to daily headlines and TV-news reports. Covering one is like sitting around watching the grass not grow. In The Grapes...
...west. Great white fingers developed from the left and right and flowed quickly toward a black, horizontally rolling cloud, which lifted to reveal a huge, whirling black vortex coming straight at me. I threw myself to the ground but couldn't help watching. The outside of the tornado was spinning so fast my eye couldn't follow it, but the inside was rotating almost lazily. I could see a thousand feet up inside it. Tiny fingers of lightning lined the hollow tube. The tornado grew until it covered three-quarters of the sky, then slammed into the gravel...
Take, for example, the cover of Time dated May 20, 1996. A barreling tornado attacks Hodges, Tex, covered by the headline, "On the Trail of Twisters." The inside story reveals a bit more in the second paragraph: "No, this is not one of those scary scenes from the movie 'Twister,' which opened in theaters across the country last week." Hmmm, sounds like this is a major movie, and it's out just in time for the beginning of the summer season. Maybe I should go to the box office and pay my $7 to see it. After...
...heard the roar of winds and saw something like a fireball on the northwestern side of the sky. I jumped into an irrigation canal and escaped the demon's path." --A farmer in Bangladesh, of the tornado that leveled 60 villages and may have killed as many as 1,000 people...
...movie Twister has sparked an upsurge in destructo-videos. Forces of Nature, a CBS special two weeks ago, featured grabby footage of tornadoes, earthquakes and other natural disasters. pbs's Savage Skies spent four hours last week chronicling nature's bad temper. More than two dozen severe-weather videos are on the market--available by mail order, in stores and online--including several from the Weather Channel (Target Tornado) and National Geographic (Nature's Fury!) as well as smaller outfits like Goodtimes Home Video (Twister: Fury on the Plains). Tornado!, a Fox TV movie that aired last week...