"The same thing that happens to everything else:"
The worst-case scenario for a large tornado striking Houston makes a hurricane look like high surf.
Spinning at 225 mph, the tornado touches down in southwest Houston, skirting the Astrodome and barreling through parts of River Oaks, Montrose and the Heights before exiting the city's northeast edge.
At the end of its run, the tornado will have killed as many as 23,700 people whose residences and business cannot withstand the deadly wind.
That's the conclusion of severe storm researchers using new data to model the effects of large tornadoes striking U.S. metropolitan areas such as Houston, Chicago and Dallas. The researchers say there is little data to know for sure how many people would die in urban structures in a large tornado.
River Oaks? Montrose? What kind of contrarian tornado aims at the wealthy areas of town? Do we really believe a twister would deliberately avoid the fine trailer parks just to our east? Or the low rent housing in our southern neighborhoods? Why must the beautiful people always suffer?
Such a thing has never happened in Houston. But if it did, it could become the deadliest natural disaster ever to strike Texas, perhaps even eclipsing the 8,000 dead from the Galveston Hurricane of 1900.
With a hurricane, people have advance warning, and the gridlock associated with Hurricane Rita aside, generally can get out of the way.
The warning time for tornadoes, is measured in minutes rather than hours or days. The average tornado moves at about 30 mph.
Because the odds of a killer tornado are relatively remote, Houston emergency planners are correct to focus their efforts on hurricanes rather than tornadoes, said Bill Read, meteorologist-in-chief at the Houston/Galveston office of the National Weather Service.
"It is challenging enough for those in emergency preparedness to get people to be concerned about floods and hurricanes -- both of which have a proven track record in our city for taking lives and destroying large amounts of property, without specifically going after a long-track F4 scenario," he said.
The tornado that hit New Orleans earlier this month has gotten everyone a mite squirrely. Yes, if an F4 tornado touched down in metro Houston and stayed on the ground for any length of time, it could be devastating. So could a nuclear airburst over downtown, a category 5 hurricane coming up the Ship Channel, or Martian canisters dropping onto the Galleria. Short of buying an NOAA radio (which you probably ought to have during hurricane season around here anyway), I don't know that we need to panic.
Or distract ourselves further from the Anna Nicole Smith hearings.
I saw this yesterday. Yet more attempts to scare the crapola out of innocent readers given the chances of a giant, killer twister hitting the city are about as good as the movie Twister suddenly becoming a film classic.
I think I’ll choose to worry about the pending war with Iran instead.
Add Killer Tornado to the long list of shit that I’m not going to worry too much about. It sounds a lot like any local news coverage. “Something in YOUR refridgerator might be dangerous to your children! Tune in at five!” (And it’s not Anna Nicole’s liquid methadone….God I’m ashamed that I even know about that.)
Having grown up on the aforementioned east side of Houston, I can attest to its tornado magnetism. My elementary school got hit by three of them dby the time I finished fourth grade.
And while Houston does get its share of tornados, F4s are really fairly rare. I would hazard to guess that the presense of the Gulf so close to the south would preclude the formation of one in our area.
That is scary. And not the thing I wanted to read today: I’m flying to Houston on Sunday. But it’s not tornado season. Right? Right?