[wavehunter007]

Originally Posted by Stratford, Ct. Resident

I believe that one reached over to New Canaan, but didn't touch down. There was a time period of about 45 seconds where it was just absolutely pitch black, about 10 minutes before the reported touchdown in Greenwich. Scary stuff.

I’m far east of you, but I did see that on the Channel 8 News. I also remember someone telling me there was an F2 tornado in your neck of the woods (Milford/Stratford) in 1971, killed 3 people, or something. If you look online, they have a video of a tornado in outside of Waterbury, CT awhile back. It was pretty impressive. Despite the myth, the northeast has had it’s share of natural disiaster. Look at the 1938 hurricane…700 people killed on Long Island, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

Also, a quick note about housing prices...

I see a lot of complaints about the cost of housing in CT. People who are looking to relocate here…..should remember Western CT is far more expensive than Eastern CT. There are still many nice towns and some great house bargains in New London and Windham Counties. Close to casinos, beaches, seafood restaurants, Mystic. It can be cheaper than the cities in southwestern CT closer to NYC. IF you stay close to I-395 or Route 2 (between Hartford and New London) you can commute to many of the regional job centers.

[JViello]

Originally Posted by wavehunter007

If you look online, they have a video of a tornado in outside of Waterbury, CT awhile back. It was pretty impressive.

Ha, that was 1989 and I was in it...it was pretty nasty and cool all at the same time.

I was in the car with my mother heading down Hamilton Avenue, and made a comment about the "holy crap storm" coming down from the NW - which was the norm for that region. You always get the Summer afternoon cold front blowing in from the NW and upstate NY which mixes with the warm humid inflow from the ocean that causes pretty good T-storms. Our own little tornado alley.

In about 5 minutes, the wind picked up, a transformer blew out behind us with a bright flash and trees started falling and branches flying around etc.

All I could think is "Oh crap, my Camaro is in the driveway and not the garage!" LOL gotta love youthful priorities.

I'll never forget it though it was awesome...I love being in the middle of natural disasters like that in a sick kind of way.

[andthentherewere3]

I'm one of those weird people that love natural disasters, too. I grew up in "tornado alley", and have been through tornadoes. Once I was in a pick-up truck and it was flipped over. And yet I still love bad storms. We had a bad storm with hail and a tornado warning come through here last year, and there I was outside trying to get my car in the garage, getting pelted by hail. We don't get the frequent tornadoes that other areas do, but we do get them all the same.

[Stratford, Ct. Resident]

Originally Posted by wavehunter007

I also remember someone telling me there was an F2 tornado in your neck of the woods (Milford/Stratford) in 1971, killed 3 people, or something.

Interesting. I wasn't aware of that(slightly before my time).

Originally Posted by wavehunter007

If you look online, they have a video of a tornado in outside of Waterbury, CT awhile back. It was pretty impressive.

I do remember that in '89, there was a tornado that initially touched down in Waterbury, before moving southward to Hamden.

[Golden1]

Actually this natural distaster/tornado postings belongs in this "I hate living here" (meaning CT) thread. The new pattern is people who enjoy being around or in a major natural disaster such as a tornado but damn it there's not enough of them in CT to get the thrill on People talk of moving to North Carolina or Tennessee to escape taxes and have more jobs available, but how about we start a trend of people WANTING to move to tornado alleys in Kansas That would mess up some of the Kansas board who want to move away from such threats.

By the way, the above post is all tongue in cheek as you can tell by the smiley faces. I just wanted to bring the weather topic/tornado thrill back into why we hate CT (or why we don't I guess). My uncle lived in Windsor CT years back (70's or 80's) and a tornado devastated his home while he was at work. He couldn't believe the odds of this happening in CT and it happening to him as it only messed up a few sporatic people in the area with no rhymn or reason (it's flight path I guess). It was like some bizarre lottery where the odds were a two million to one.

[Cambium]

Originally Posted by Golden1

Actually this natural distaster/tornado postings belongs in this "I hate living here" (meaning CT) thread.

LMAO! So true..I hate living here because there aren't enough natural disasters. LOL

I'm still waiting for 4 feet of snow. I think snow is the "safest" per say natural disaster in the sense it causes less damage.

It is a test of the mental ability to be home bound. (Thats if you dont own a snow mobile)

[wavehunter007]

Originally Posted by Golden1

Actually this natural distaster/tornado postings belongs in this "I hate living here" (meaning CT) thread. The new pattern is people who enjoy being around or in a major natural disaster such as a tornado but damn it there's not enough of them in CT to get the thrill on People talk of moving to North Carolina or Tennessee to escape taxes and have more jobs available, but how about we start a trend of people WANTING to move to tornado alleys in Kansas That would mess up some of the Kansas board who want to move away from such threats.

By the way, the above post is all tongue in cheek as you can tell by the smiley faces. I just wanted to bring the weather topic/tornado thrill back into why we hate CT (or why we don't I guess). My uncle lived in Windsor CT years back (70's or 80's) and a tornado devastated his home while he was at work. He couldn't believe the odds of this happening in CT and it happening to him as it only messed up a few sporatic people in the area with no rhymn or reason (it's flight path I guess). It was like some bizarre lottery where the odds were a two million to one.

Until I started researching these topics and having to find data on them…. I thought the same thing.

What’s the chance of …….here in my back yard? The scientific reality of course is different (it always is). If you go back far enough, you see many things in the record you don’t expect to see…like a hurricane hitting southern California near LA 1843…or an earthquake off Cape Ann (Boston) in 1755, that knocked down buildings in New Haven and Stamford…. or tornado that touched
down right in the heart of NYC in 1756….of a major snowstorm in San Francisco in 1905. It’s even more terrifying to me that some folks new to a region… don’t even know what hazards have happened 50 or 250 years ago. Tell someone along the CT coast or on Long Island…. that 75 years ago a hurricane with 120-mph winds and a 20-foot tidal surge swept away 1000 buildings and killed 700 people - and they’ll look at you like your crazy. Tell someone they have the same risk of dying in a major earthquake in Missouri as in California…and they’ll laugh at you.

I think part of the problem is memories are short and history gets lost quick. I think today’s news is so hyped and image driven…that many Americans have only a casual sense of regional history and what natural hazards each region truly faces. Then I remember that famous man who said ….”those who don’t remember history are condemned to repeat it”.

[Yankeerose00]

Sure every state gets and has gotten tornadoes. But looking at that list that dates back to the 1800's there have been only a handful of them and most of them were F0 or F1. Still a person cannot compare the northeast to the west or the southern states in terms of the frequency or the strength of tornados. A person is in for a rude, rude awakening if they wave their hand and think "I can handle the south or tornado alley. After all, CT gets tornadoes, too."
First of all, most of the south doesn't have basements. My parents live in TN (they are getting the heck out this year) and since there are no basements, the news is always doing specials every spring on what to do when there is tornado. You are supposed to drag a mattress over your bathtub! Good luck fitting a big family in the tub. Or you are supposed to hide behind a couch or go into a closet away from any outer walls. Then you just pray the tornado doesn't hit you. In the northeast, you would simply go to the basement. Problem solved.
Another thing, if an area doesn't have sirens, they most likely don't have a problem with tornadoes. I don't know of anyplace north of the carolinas that has sirens.
I don't know why anyone in the northeast would even want to act like their weather is comparable in any way to tornado alley. It simply isn't. Most of New England isn't even flat enough to get a huge tornado built up. So yeah they can happen, but again, I know of many a northerner who was in for a surprise when they moved down south and heard sirens several times a month and had no basement to go into. I agree that it is important to understand history but comparing New England to the south or midwest regarding tornadoes is like comparing New England to Georgia regarding snow. Sure Georgia gets snow. But not near the amounts that NE gets. It's just not the same.
I'll take New England weather anyday over the crap the rest of the US sees on a regular basis. I'm a nervous wreck all Feb-april because of the amount of tornadoes that my parents area sees. Last year, on Super Tuesday, my parents' area had 87 tornadoes touch down from Tuesday night to Wed morning. 5 of those were F4 category. 87 tornadoes in one night! My parents said it sounded like trains all around them.

List of tornadoes in the 2008 Super Tuesday tornado outbreak - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


No thanks, you can have the south. I'll take my chances with tornadoes in New England.

[wavehunter007]

Originally Posted by Yankeerose00

First of all, most of the south doesn't have basements. My parents live in TN (they are getting the heck out this year) and since there are no basements, the news is always doing specials every spring on what to do when there is tornado. You are supposed to drag a mattress over your bathtub! Good luck fitting a big family in the tub. Or you are supposed to hide behind a couch or go into a closet away from any outer walls. Then you just pray the tornado doesn't hit you. In the northeast, you would simply go to the basement. Problem solved.

Untrue,

PLENTY of homes in the Northeast and Connecticut don’t have basements…I’m sitting in one along the southeast Connecticut coast right now. Many people live in mobile homes and cottages along the Connecticut coast with no basements (Milford, Branford, Clinton, Westbrook, Old Saybrook, East Lyme). My brother in Wallingford lives in a 107-year-old farmhouse… with no basement.

Also...there are PLENTY of regions that don’t have tornado sirens in the USA; case in point is Ohio. Even after deadly tornadoes killed 34 people near Xenia, Ohio…there are no sirens in that region today. A deadly swarm of tornadoes hit parts of Pennsylvania in 1985…and Pennsylvania has no tornado sirens. Parts of Indiana and Illinois see some tornadoes every year, and many regions don’t have sirens.


I think you might have missed my point (or perhaps you didn’t read it)…my original post was not that Connecticut (or the Northeast) had the same risk of tornadoes as the Tornado Alley…..only that it had some risk. Of course, nowhere in the USA has as high a risk of tornadoes as the southern Plains (TX, OK, KS). Many parts of the south, like Tennessee have a puny risk of tornadoes when compared to the Great Plains. In fact, while the risk of a tornado is greater in Tennessee than in any of the Northeast States…..TO THIS DAY…Tennessee does NOT have a spot on the top 20 Deadliest Single Tornadoes (more than 50 killed in one Tornado)…while a NORTHEAST state...Massachusetts has. The 1953 MA Tornado still did more damage and killed more people than ANY tornado in the history of Tennessee.

Also, different regions have different hazards. Many people have been killed along the Northeast Coast and billions in property have been destroyed by hurricanes since 1900. Places like Tennessee have NO hurricane risk because they are inland. Severe weather is not just a north-south ratio. The coast of Connecticut and Long Island, NY have been hit with more major hurricanes have have experinced more hurricnae damage than the coast of Georgia… even though Georgia is further south.

By the way...hiding behind a couch in a tornado will not save your life.

[Golden1]

Wavehunter, you're right. You know what's funny about the media? Some seriously wild stuff has happened in the past in areas just as you mentioned and yet if something 1/100th the strength of that event happens they scream and look for answers 24/7 until a bigger news story comes. I mean look at the dustbowl? That was crazy. When they go over record temps I wonder what those people were thinking in 1933 or even 1977 because they weren't pointing fingers at global warming then. Stuff just happens I guess sometimes.

I think the winters were nastier when I was younger and I never recalled newscasters spreading panic over anything less than 10 inches muchless 3 inches like they're doing now. They have my mother-in-law shopping for groceries 3 days ahead of any snowfall thinking it's going to be the blizzard of 09 and she won't have power for a week. Man, I hate CT! Ha ha! Just referring to the thread! Did you ever notice the people that relish the first snowfall and jump for joy at that first snowflake are the very ones come late January that say they've had enough of this weather and can't wait for Spring?