Quote:
Originally Posted by danielj72
It happened here in Michigan in 1953. 118 people were killed in Flint Michigan that year in a tornado that was very similar to the one in Missouri last week. This recent event has brought that old subject up here in Michigan lately, I guess it is bringing back bad memories for those old enough to remember it. Up until last week the Flint tornado was the last US tornado to kill over 100 people. Everyone thought modern weather forcasting had made death tolls like this a thing of the past. Unfornately this has been proved untrue.
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I some of what I'm going to say is likely a terrible thing to say.
I can remember the 1974 outbreak, the 1984 Carolinas outbreak and the 1985 Pennsylvania outbreak, and they all fell very solidly into NO ONE EXPECTED THIS - not now, maybe 50 or 100 years ago, but not now. There were exampled of damage in all three that fell into freakish/grotesque territory. There were hundreds or thousands of deaths in places like mobile homes or cars, many thousands of injuries.
It was not long thereafter that a chorus of how could this happened met Hurricane Hugo as it did well over a billion $ in damage in WESTERN NC - 200+ miles inland, at elevations that ranged from 500 to 6700 feet above sea level.
Then came Andrew and Katrina.
Look at each of these storms collectively and not individually and you'll see a common thread of "we did a number of things to ensure that it could nevere get as bad as what we are seeing, so we are at a loss to explain why we are seeing this, and we don't have the slightest clue as to how we're going to pick up the pieces." All the possible scenarios, and solutions to those scenarios are not experience based for the most part - if NoLA is a city of crime, tourists, jazz and junkies, then the stories coming from those folks are of dubious veracity, compared with an ACOE simulation that seems to think something like MRGO is a brilliant idea.
I think Joplin - like Katrina, Andrew, Hugo, the Super Outbreak, and the other storms I mentioned - is yet another recent reminder to NOT take our mastery of science for granted. There remain limits, and once every few years nature throws something at us that reminds us of those limits: a really HUGE tornado in the Northeast, a really HUGE blizzard in the south, a massive flood in the west or southwest. I am sure we can think of examples of all of the above, and of all the confusion those events elicited in the general public, and - most importantly - in the 'talking head' community of scientists, commentators and gatekeepers whose responsibilities include reassuring the rest of us that all the old rules haven't just gone kpffffft.
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