We've actually had big tornado (EF4) in the Czech rep. last summer. Six people died, ca 1200 houses were damaged and about two hundred of them had to be demolished. But you are right, it's very rare - disaster this big only happened here eleven times that we know of in the last 1000 years
1200 houses? That too European construction that uses bricks and concrete unlike American homes, which are made from cardboard. Does anyone try to shoot at the storm like Yanks apparently do?
@@retrocompaq5212 yeah I think the bangaldesh tornadoes eating is disputed but Argentina and France both have a f5 tornado credit in 1973 and 1967 respectively
Being a European, I've heard about tornadoes in Europe maybe a few times in my life. In Poland we've had like 3-5 in the last 20 years, they damaged a few houses... Basically tornado isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you think about natural disasters in Europe. Floods are the most common ones here probably.
From France, and yeah, droughts and floods are usually the most damaging things. There's been a few tempests that damaged stuff, but they are decennial or just about. We almost never get Earthquakes, tornadoes, and don't have active volcanoes that i know of. All in all it's a pretty priviledged place to be in.
Czechs had real tornado last year so you might get one in Poland aswell ! Im now little worried every time when storm rolls in. Never though about it like that before last year.
Back when my family used to live in the UK (We're American and my dad was stationed in the UK in the military), we watched Cars when it came out in theaters. My mom always goes on about when Tow Mater said "I'm happier than a tornado in a trailer park!" and my mom would burst out laughing but the rest of the UK theater was stone dead silent.
I live in Norman, OK, where the National Weather Service is (it's actually about 1/4 mile down the road from my house). Around here we've heard every kind of Tornado story imaginable, especially with Moore, OK being just about 10 miles north. I thought I'd heard it all. But I'd never heard that story of having the air sucked out of your lungs and hearing your own voice howl--you're absolutely right, THAT IS TERRIFYING. Very hard to spook someone from my hometown about a Tornado experience. I'm sufficiently spooked. That's terrifying.
I've been through two tornados. The first one occurred when I was about 14 years-old. It literally formed about a half mile from our house, so we had absolutely no warning *(in fact, the tornado sirens didn't go off until it was about a mile past our house).* We had a tornado spot inside our house, but no one had time to get in it. I was reading on Reddit some people talking about how you could tell if the tornado was heading towards you, and someone said that, if it looked like it was standing still, it was coming at you (or going away), and if you could see movement, then you _"could be certain"_ that it was headed away from you. Yeah... *NOTHING is for CERTAIN, when it comes to a tornado.* The tornado that hit us traveled north of our house, and was only 100 yards or so from us (literally eating our neighbor's house - they were both at work so, no injuries). Then, about 20 seconds later, the tornado turned and looped back in the opposite direction on the southern side of our house *(as though it had dropped its keys and was going back to look for them).* 15 or 20 seconds after that, it looped back and retraced its path back over our neighbor's house (it literally circled our house - and the whole time it just kept sucking shingles off our roof (the only damage we took, except for a really nice elm tree my mom had planted on the northside a couple years previously - we never saw it again). No one was killed... quite a few injuries though. The second tornado occurred when I lived in Virginia. Like the first, we had zero warning before it decided to stroll up our street. I lived in a really quaint, old neighborhood in our town. I was the only one home (because I worked third shift), but I recognized the sound with only about 10 seconds to spare. We had a room for our boiler (we had radiators in the house) that served as our tornado/hurricane room. I went there. Almost as soon as I got there, it passed our house. It jumped the street next to us, flew over a small wooded area then came back down in a retail area and killed one person. I went outside to survey the damage. As it had come up the street, it started lifting in order to jump over the road I mentioned. My house had zero damage, but we lost 3- or 400 singles. *My neighbor, whose house was only 10 feet from mine, had a cedar tree rammed through her front wall.* The neighbor beyond her had part of their roof torn off and other exterior damage. The neighbor beyond them had zero roof and virtually all their top floor furniture was gone... *The next house was completely gone... there was just a slab.* All of the houses past that looked similar until you got to the other end of the street, which mirror imaged the damage on my end. As I said, I worked third shift... I was almost the only person home, everyone else was at work. Additionally, all the kids were at school, which was on the opposite end of our street and took zero damage. *Had the tornado hit only 30 minutes later, all those kids, including my six year-old daughter, would have been walking home or riding the bus directly where the tornado touched down* (I shudder to think that almost every kid could have been killed... making us one of the unluckiest neighborhoods ever - it would have been horrible).
As far as the first bit- yeah, while tornadoes *generally* have a set behavior (tend to move in a particular direction), anyone claiming they "always do X" is full of it. One case study in "Tornado that went against most/all norms" would be the 2013 El Reno tornado. Give that a look - 2.6 mi wide, and it gets worse from there...
@@garethfuller2700 -- Yeah, I've been a subscriber of Pecos Hank for a couple of years now (he's incredible, I love the stuff he does with all the animals too). I like tornado videos so I've seen the El Reno twister from about 20 different chasers. Additionally, the company I used to work for did paintless dent repair, and my job was to literally chase hail storms and help set up shops for us in areas that were hit. In fact, my company had an advertising deal with Twistex (the team who regretfully lost three chasers that day). That was a really bad day.
I strongly believe in safety. I hear that storm shelters are not cost effective in saving lives. I am sure Amazon wear houses could have built a lot of storm shelters. I believe fear factor is well worth the price. Tornadoes are scary as hell and shelters feel good. Just knowing that they are there is a good feeling. Thanks for sharing.
I had no idea that we in the UK had the most tornados per square mile. Though when they happen they tend to be weak and short lived. Media reports are like "A tornado is reported to have struck a street a Coventry. One shaken resident went out to investigate and was nearly hit by a falling roof tile. Several rooves were damaged by the freak weather event, but no one was injured".
@@carterjones8126 I wonder why they are so weak. Not to complain, I'm glad for you guys. Maybe because the amount of land they travel across is less. In Missouri they've got a good hundred miles to churn over before anything changes. In the '80s this guy was interviewed in his back yard that was completely torn up, and he said, "We're all fine, we all made it to the basement, but I have two new cars in my yard that I've never seen before."
As it happend, there actually was a F2 tornado here in germany in the summer and it was pretty close by in the city of Paderborn. later that day a friend of mine told us that her friend that lives there actually lost their roof and had to stay with her.
Was in Germany when that happened, not far from Paderborn! We thought it was going to hit us at first but it passed by. We certainly saw it forming though
I was in Turkey in the last 90s and there was a tornado it didn't last long and was lucky if it was above an F1 but i watched it walk down the runway at the air force base I was at. I was also stationed at Wichita falls TX and yeah it was pretty much every night at times we had tornado warnings.
An average of 20 to 60 tornadoes occur in Germany. Our European tornado route often travels from France via Benelux to northern Germany and Poland. (The newspaper Der Stern had a report on the subject)
Tornado alley story - when I was in middle school, we were having football practice in a field, and a funnel cloud started forming directly over our heads. We all panicked and started running, but luckily the funnel dissipated before it touched ground. Needless to say, we still decided it was probably best to cancel practice for the day.
@@zulimi It was cloudy and felt like a storm was brewing, but there wasn't any lightning yet and just a light drizzle of rain, which is why practice hadn't yet been called off
@@zulimi hi, another child of the tornado alley here. The sky will take a greenish hue on as well. Though it can be difficult to tell sometimes. What's weird (and a bit scary) is they can come out of nowhere as well. I remember there being days that everything seemed fine in the morning but a tornado will show up just a couple hours later. Alot of people I knew would just keep an eye on the different wind fronts, because you need a cold and hot one clashing for a tornado. The news will even say that it's got the perfect ingredients for a tornado so be prepared just in case.
When I was 6, I was living in Louisiana and a tornado hit my small town and damaged our house while we were in it. We lived on a big lot and lost 45 trees in that one storm. The chimneys made an awful noise like a train was about to hit our living room. Before taking shelter, I saw the twister rip two trees out of the ground and throw them an unimaginable distance. It sucked a concrete slab from our carport out of the ground and deposited across the street in a field. The only fatality was our next door neighbor's dog, who was crushed by debris. After the storm, I walked outside and the smell of sawdust was incredibly strong. There was no sawdust, it was the smell of trees that had been ripped apart. That odor still brings me right back to that day 30 years ago.
There was a “ tornado” in Coventry last fall. Messed up some roof tiles on some houses. It may have tipped over a transit van, but they think that might have been some of the local kids. Nobody was injured. But, apparently that was the biggest UK tornado in decades.
My family used to go on holiday in a static caravan site in Selsey Bill every year for about a decade. There was one change in the entire time; the old caravan we used to rent was replaced with a newer better one. (But the new one still had Pong. That was good.) A few years after we stopped going, (which was also a few years after I'd learned all about tornados in the US,) a tornado ripped through it. Seeing the pictures was very, very surreal.
I grew up in central Florida which also gets a lot of tornadoes and every time a storm comes through (so daily for about half a year) you just look at the clouds to check the color and to see if you could spot any funnel clouds forming. Before I started at the local university I went to, a tornado came by on Christmas and completely destroyed a couple of buildings. While I was going there, a microburst blew out a couple of windows in the building I worked in but we were never hit by a tornado.
I was in a faculty writers' group meeting near Nashville, Tennessee in 2006 when the safety officer came by to tell us to get under the table. A minute later, the tornado tore through the campus. Light fixtures and ceiling tiles crashed down, and the building went dark. Once the all clear was sounded, I went out to the parking lot to see if my truck was still there among the swirled cars. The college president's car was atop a tree, but my truck was gone. I peered across a field to see a greyish lump of metal a couple hundred yards away and realized that I'd need a ride home. The one bit of good news is that I found out that tornadoes do not sound like trains. They sound like industrial ventilation fans.
Doing a project on tornadoes in high school, my partner said, “We have to go outside for this.” Meaning: what a tornado sounded like to her. She explained it was one sound she’d never forget, and then proceeded to give voice to something like an avalanche roar and the Nazgul’s unholy shriek. She said she’d heard it as a small child, and was pretty sure the scream was her mother, screaming at the storm when it nearly yanked my classmate from her mother’s arms. Why they were out and caught by the storm, she did not share. Just the sound.
A few years back a EF-0 went through the apartment complex I lived in about 6 am. It woke me up because it sounded just like a freight train going right though the apartment corridor. Thankfully it only did minor damage. I have been though some slightly larger tornadoes, but those were during hurricanes and I could not hear anything different other than the general sound of storm.
The one I was in that went thru down town slc some 20+ years ago really sounded like a freight train going thru to me and just about everyone else that described it lol
To me it did sound like a freight train. Not a train you hear these days, but a very angry runaway locomotive freight train that’s howling. Think Thomas the tank engine on steroids in a roid rage induced Wild West howling contest.
When I was a kid, we lived in a mobile home. A tornado hit one night. It lifted our house off the ground a few feet before slamming it back down. It also ripped the roof off of the back half, sending pieces of it all over, including through the windows of neighbors' houses. It was the middle of the night and, being in the middle of the country, there was no warning siren or anything to alert us sooner. Not that we had anywhere else we could go, anyway. Anyhow, no one was hurt fortunately. I somehow managed to sleep through the whole thing, only realizing something must have happened the next day when all my toys that were on a shelf were now on the floor. It's probably for the best I don't sleep THAT soundly anymore. The next day when our landlord came out to help clean up, he and my step-dad spent a good hour or two rocking back and forth a 2x4 from our roof that had impaled the ground, blunt-end first, into the dirt about 2 feet.
The biggest natural disaster threat potential for the US is probably a super earthquake in the Pacific northwest. The tsunami caused by it could kill millions.
Not too much to say. I live in SW Michigan and we don't get tornadoes real often. I've been in 3 or 4 here in my hometown. Once we we were driving down the freeway and a rain wrapped funnel formed right over the car. It lifted the vehicle off the ground twice. We felt it bounce each time it dropped it. When I was a young woman one skipped over our house, bye bye chimney, this one came in the night. There were regular drills in the schools so we knew where to go and how to behave. As a young mother my town was hit by an f-3. Three killed and much damage, a church was hit, it was brick and the only thing left was the foundation. Nothing else was ever found, even the bricks were gone. Once you have had a close encounter of the twister type you don't forget it. People who are traumatized by a f-0 or a f-1 will hopefully never live through a bigger one. I saw the damage that a f-5 did. Weather personnel were warning that if you wanted to survive, find a shelter or get below ground. It looked like a mile wide vacuum cleaner went through. To this day I won't buy or live in a home without a basement or shelter.
As someone who lives in California where tornadoes almost never happen, the statement "we don't get tornados real often" next to "I've been in 3 or 4" was quite the experience to read, hah.
I had to live in a home that didn’t have a basement (far too much limestone, you had to blast dynamite to make foundations so despite the frequent storms nobody really bothered unless they had “walk in basements” on hillsides with new construction), and insult to injury, no place to shelter-long hall, every room had a window (even the bathrooms), NO interior rooms, NO closers big enough to stick a family + pets. Yeah. It gave me cptsd that’s only getting better in that respect after moving someplace that isn’t EVERY Storm Is Severe Thunderstorms (and capable of staightline winds flattening everything or tornados). NOW I have a basement. Because NOW it’s SANDY Soil so it’s easy for folks to have one. And the thunderstorms here are…kinda a joke. As a child in my homestate that I lived until 3 years ago? It was common enough for the house to sound like it was in a vacuum with an utter ROAR of wind outside, with the pressure feeling like your head needs your ears to pop. Or quite literally have walls of water dumping from the sky, and realizing you lost a tree; the rain was too thick and loud to hear it crash. Or hear a tree closer to the house bending and snapping and make the house shake as it landed parallel to the hall you and your parents tried to shelter in, hoping it will not fall on you FUCK not having at the very least an interior bathroom with NO WINDOWS to use as a storm shelter. It is my no1 requirement for an apartment-I’ll invest in high quality screws and locks and a cricket bat THANKS
Northern Michigan here, we have only had two watches in my home town. Aka, no tornado ever came, yet we got to see a super cell once. Kinda dope. One dropped in Gaylord last year. First time I've heard of a tornado in N MI like ever.
also SW Michigan here, and Ive also been in a couple of tornadoes. I remember hard rain, losing power, then several trees falling on the house and car. they're surprisingly very quick. Our deadliest tornado was an F3 that killed 5 people, but I know there was an F5 in Flint in 1953. Cant really say much else ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm from southeast Michigan, or Rochester Hills. I've pretty much never gotten any tornadoes that touch down in my life. I mean, the area where I live is pretty hilly and forested, hence the name. Only just last summer in 2022, a tornado touched down not too far from my city. I think it went past and ended up near Flint, then subsided as usual. Other than that and a couple other bad storms that didn't result in a tornado, I'd say the weather is sort of calm other than some storms occasionally.
I experienced one tornado.... and I was camping in a friend's RV. I was actually wandering around outside wondering what was going on and then the wind started beating the rig around and I figured even though an RV is a tornado magnet, it was still safer than being outside.
I remember being on vacation in the summer of 1974, visiting relatives in Ohio. I was just a teenager but we drove through a town that had been hit badly by tornadoes during the previous April. The town was called Xenia. The tornado was a F-5. Multiple schools and commercial buildings were destroyed. The sight of 150 year old oak trees torn out of the ground was incredible. I believe the damage was so great that the federal government instituted new weather warnings and improved safety warnings in response to the damage caused by the tornadoes that touched down that April day across the Midwest.
I'll never forget the tornado outbreak in 2011, driving through what looked like giant scratch marks and destroyed homes on my thirty minute highway trip home. I thought for sure my house and my dogs were gone. They were a little shook up, as was I, but safe and sound.
Thank you for this video. It just so happens, that we had a tornado in Europe last summer. Cause covid was starting to get boring I guess. We rarely have tornados in Czechia and they usually are up to F2 and don't occure in populated areas, do most people don't even know about it. Just imagine the shock, when F4 tornado goes through seven villages destroying everything in its way. It felt unreal. Whole republic got together to aid the effected area, it was truly heartwarming. My family lives nearby, my brother-in-law is a voluntary firefighter and helped to remove debris, consequentially received medal. There is a ton of footage too, cause most people didn't recognize the danger. Who would have thought. One video truly speaks to me, there is a woman talking to her husband while taking the video, she sound like an averige neighbour saying "look, how the trees are bending, wow, it looks just like in America" and stuff. As if she is watching a movie. And then she goes silent for a second as it occures to her, it's indeed a tornado and it's happening right now to her and her family. She just silently says: "I think it's comming our way" and then her husband rushes her to the basement. It's really hard to watch. Six people dies that day, up to 300 were injured and many homes were destroyed. In our small, safe country most people never heard of.
Considering how solid Czech architecture tends to be, the pictures of that particular tornado's aftermath were pretty scary, somewhat reminiscent of older pictures of towns that the Red Army had taken in the later part of WWII.
There is an absolutely amazing video of that tornado. Maybe the beet video of a tornado I’ve ever seen, which is so ironic since no one was expecting it and there are no chasers there while tornado alley sometimes 100+ people at once chasing tornados with cameras permanently recording.
Yep, that was a shocker, absolutely unreal. IIRC, there was a newspaper article stating that the last tornado of this size was recorded in 10th century - a millenium ago! That really drives home how rare this occurence is, and I do hope we have another thousand years to go without one. Some students of our school are from the affected area, all of their class went to help. The solidarity that people exhibit at such moments is something I am indefinitely grateful for, as it restores my hopes for the humanity.
Kinda disappointed the title is "Why are there no tornadoes in Europe?" when the video is actually "Why are there so many tornadoes in the US?" There's very little talk of Europe.
Jup. The title is misleading. Should've been "Why is there so many tornadoes in the US versus the rest of the world?" Mentioning Europe in the title gives you the expectation that the video teaches you why there's no tornadoes in Europe. Which is also incorrect btw, cuz there are tornadoes in Europe, just not such big ones as the US. But either way people who click on a video about Europe are probably not interested in 95% info about a total different area 🤷.
@@mrcrackdonald_1 its actually 2 things for the US: Gulf of Mexico and Corn. And yes, that second one is true, its why the Northern states get tornados. Its wild how much moisture corn puts into the atmosphere.
"If you're in a mobile home, go literally anywhere else." Yes! My family and I have joked for decades that mobile homes have a target on the roof that only tornadoes can see.
I remember the 87 tornado in Edmonton. It was the single most terrifying thing I've encountered thus far in my life. Baseball size hail and twisted trees 3' in diameter like they were spaghetti noodles. It was close to a mile wide if I'm not mistaken.
I was like 3 when it happened. Grandpa was working at Canada Packers that day. Safety guy. I think he probably saved a few lives. As he told it a lot of the workforce was standing in the parking lot gawking as it rolled in. Bullhorn “GTF inside lmao”. Lost to time now, so is he. Hopefully we don’t have another any time soon.
7:05 This is absolutely true. I grew up and currently live in Birmingham Alabama and as a kid, we would maybe have a tornado every one or two years, but recently we’ve been getting multiple strong tornados a year, sometimes multiple in a month.
Living in Switzerland (but anyone I know in other European countries says pretty much the same thing), tornados have always been this fantastical, far-off and exotic natural disaster that I heard off in stories like the Wizard of Oz, and I knew they existed and were bad, but never really thought about how they impacted real people. I was only in my late teens when it slowly dawned on me how incredibly real of a threat they are when I saw certain pictures of tornados in the US and learned about not just the scale of the destruction, but also how frequently you guys have to deal with them. To think that for many people in the US, tornado drills are something completely normal is wild to me. In Europe, we're also mostly spared from Earthquakes, and those that do happen often don't really affect us. Not only because they're far weaker in general so we often don't even notice them, but whenever a slightly stronger one does happen, many of our houses are so solidly built that we can just shrug it off. In most of Europe, floods and, in southern Europe, droughts, are by far the most destructive natural disaster, and in Switzerland specifically, small earthquakes can cause avalanches - and those are a very real threat that can bury a village in a terrifying instant. Our houses thus need to be built to last, so they don't just get swept away. If your house gets buried in an avalanche with you in it, you have a pretty good chance of making it out alive because the rescuers have alot of time to dig you out of there, and with any luck, you have enough air to last you several days. If our walls were made of plywood like in the US (no disrespect lol), you'd be crushed flat by the rubble before you knew what hit you. Avalanches are not something that I've personally witnessed (except in the news), but flooding is rather common, and I remember the Great Alpine Flood of '05 like it was yesterday. I was only 6 then, but I remember how all of us kids helped stack the sandbags by our school and other buildings, how the firemen rowed their boats through the streets that were filled knee to head high, depending on where you were, the ducks swimming next to them to keep them company, and how we played pirates on the benches next to the lake, the bench being our pirate ship, completely surrounded by water. More importantly, I remember many of the people I know who lost almost everything they owned in this disaster, and how we spent the rest of the year cleaning up the destruction and pumping the water out of the first floors and cellars. Thankfully, at least in Switzerland, only 6 people actually died, but in surrounding countries that were also hit, many were less lucky. It's quite a surreal memory to me, because I viewed much of it through the lens of a child - plus, my family's house was along a hill so we were personally spared from the worst. In comparison to yearly strong tornadoes, this might not seem like that much of a big deal, but I believe it was thanks to our solid infrastructure that even most of those whose homes were hit the worst were able to rebuild and repair them eventually instead of being compmetely displaced. Without those solid foundations, things would have been much, much worse and many more people would have died.
Fun fact, lighter and more flexible construction is more likely to survive an earthquake. Any concrete or masonry must be reinforced (rebar) to be deemed safe and pass code in California. Even in a 6.5 magnitude quake when I was a kid, almost all of our wood frame construction houses were perfectly fine despite roads and sidewalks being broken up and cracked apart and older concrete buildings being completely leveled. The only houses that weren't okay were shifted on their foundation or had damaged foundations. Also, you want to avoid post and beam construction for houses in earthquake areas as it's heavier and harder to reinforce for the kinds of stresses put on the joints between beams. It's all about prioritizing the right construction method for the environment.
Unfortunately we have horrific floods, droughts, earthquakes and avalanches in North America too. I'm unfortunately live in a place by the Rockies that has floods and avalanches plus destructive blizzards, snow squalls and tornadoes. In fact we had a horrific flood 9 years ago that killed many people and destroyed thousands of homes and buildings (and an even more destructive last year, just one province over from me). I guess at least I'm lucky that where I live, at least, we're too far up to get Hurricanes here, and earthquakes are rare. The point is, weather is just more extreme in North America than most places in Europe; which sucks, but I would never live anywhere else. You take the bad with the good! :)
I am from Bangladesh and I've read about that tornado when I was in High School but I never expected it to be the deadliest Tornado ever recorded thanks for the info
I grew up with tornadoes my entire life. Once we were in the basement of my grandparents' farm house and their feral barn cat (who ran at the sight of people) passed her kittens to my grandpa through the tiny basement window. The tornado pulled up into just a funnel cloud when it went over the house, but I remember looking out of the window up into some swirling, terrifying, dark clouds before being snatched away by my dad and covered up. The second one happened the day after Joplin was destroyed, they were south of us. I was working at a preschool when we had to get classrooms full of children into bathrooms etc... I was at the front desk when a mother pulled in to pick up her children. I ran to the foyer to open the doors so she wouldn't have to key in her code because a funnel cloud was over the building across the street and heading toward us. She was clueless and didn't understand my gesture to hurry up. How can you be that f*&#ing ignorant about tornadoes when you live in KANSAS?! The siren was going off LITERALLY on the property. (it's fun for the infant room teachers when that goes off every month for testing) The third one happened to my Aunt and Uncle. Their neighborhood was actually hit by a tornado. We happened to be visiting grandparents shortly after and drove over to see the damage. It was some of the weirdest shit I have ever seen. Since it was in the boondocks of their state, they had a television antenna. It was wrapped around a small balcony on the second floor off of the main bedroom. The blown glass hummingbird feeder hanging from it didn't have a crack or chip. We saw someone's boxing ring tangled up in the top of a tree. Another family's breakfast nook table and two chairs were lifted out of the house and dropped perfectly in a stream like some wildlife creatures were going to have their morning coffee there.
@@GlowBerryPumpkin I can believe it all. Lifelong experience with tornadoes and runs to the basement (when there was enough of a warning). Animals can behave VERY differently in the face of a natural disaster, and the mothering instinct in cats can overcome any fear. I've heard stranger stories.
When he mentioned an EF-5 tornado outside of the US, I thought Joe was going to talk about the one we had in the next town over in Elie, Manitoba, Canada but luckily no injuries were reported
That’s what I was thinking of too. I’m next door in Saskatchewan and we get tornadoes too as well as in Alberta. The Edmonton tornado in 1987 was a very destructive one. I’ve personally seen two tornadoes here in Saskatchewan. It makes sense that we get them here. We are just a continuation of the US Great Plains. It’s hot and dry, and when a cool, humid air mass rolls through, you are getting a hell of a thunderstorm, and a chance for a twister.
We had a big tornado rip through a small town close to where I live just a couple months ago. It was very strange how selective the damage can be. Driving through the town, we had seen a house absolutely destroyed with the trees ripped in half. But the house next door just 75 feet over looked like nothing happened. Crazy stuff
Right?! It's insane how it can TOTALLY DESTROY one side on the street.. but then somehow the other side is [comparatively] pristine! Wonder how that happens... is it the inherent randomness of fluid dynamics, or something else entirely? I'm sure somebody knows!
That could be due to the size of the tornado. If it's small enough you can see that damage be localized to only the path the tornado follows. It's easier to see it with a big one like came through just north of Atlanta back in the late 90s. It left a clear path of destruction where you could see buildings and trees flattened as though someone had come through with a huge bulldozer knocking a path a hundred feet wide or for what seemed like miles. While everything to either side was relatively undamaged (just some things knocked over.)
I can already tell Plead is talking about Dec 10-11. That thing ripped concrete slabs out of foundations and shattered said concrete. Still waiting on the deserved EF5 rating....
As someone who lives in Kansas, when we hear that there is a tornado around, we immediately go outside and try to find it. Also I didn't notice until you mentioned it but tornados here have been getting more uncommon.
In my lifetime Greensburg is the only big one that’s happened here in the state, that entire town pretty much was leveled, it was hard to look at the news. I’ve never understood the appeal of going outside to watch when the sirens go off but that stereotype is 100% real
I grew up peacefully in a little town in East Texas until 2015, when we got our own Big One. The town hadn’t been hit by one since WWII and I never thought we’d be seriously hit by one as the area was on an elevated plateau, so Tornadoes have to climb up to get to us. Well an F-IV decided to come say high. It crossed over I-20 and blew a hole through our town, destroying 30% of all buildings, killing two people (and elderly couple, their dog stayed with them and survived). I lived a couple miles east of the town, and remember dead silence, no wind, and a black wall of cloud so high you couldn’t see the top, just stretched into oblivion. At about 8:50 a powerful wind hit us, howling away. My dad yelled to get inside and we sat in the bathroom for 3 hours, waiting. The next morning I saw three helicopters flying over the town, and we lost cell service and power for 3 days. My mum was in the UK at the time and saw it on BBC News, freaked her out for sure. School got blown away, as well as an entire neighborhood flattened, and was never rebuilt. Lots of support from neighboring towns for years after, a new school was built. Go strong Van, Tx.
I remember that one and seeing some of the aftermath. I was visiting my hometown of Sulphur Springs during the 2015 day after Christmas outbreak. It was one tornado after another heading towards us. They all veered off but it was a pretty nerve-wracking afternoon.
In the early 80's, a tornado came within 1/4 mile of our house in Missouri, then demolished a large trailer park by the river. My school bus route normally picked up kids from that trailer park - except for the morning after the tornado. It picked up the two of us on our hill then just continued on to school after that, when normally it was packed - very surreal for an elementary school kid. One thing very few people mention is just how long it takes to clean up/rebuild afterwards. Trailers were picked up and tossed in that storm, reduced to matchsticks or piles of rubble. For months afterward, my school bus drove through that carnage, picking up the few kids from the luckier trailers that were damaged but not destroyed. I hid from the tornado sirens under my father's sturdy old desk that night - same desk that I'm tying this on. Still remember the unsettling feeling riding that half-empty school bus, looking out at the remains of people's homes.
So my "tornado story" was when I was in high school. I think I was in 11th grade. A storm came through, the power went out, everyone was in the inner hallway of our double-wide mobile home. I was looking out the front door (northwest facing) to see what I could see. The lightning was like a strobe light, the wind was loud, and all of a sudden two 15' tall juniper trees a little bit uphill from our house layed over sideways away from each other and the tiny saplings were being pulled out of the ground as I watched stunned. I realized I needed to hide, so I ran inside the wrong direction, turned around and ran towards the hallway where everyone else was and I tripped over a bed frame in the middle of the living room and got punctured by those super long furniture staples (destroyed the furniture, btw). The tornado bounced over our house, but the damage to the houses around us was weird. The single-wide uphill from us had a truck with a boat on its trailer under a car port... the boat detached from the back of the trailer and was upside down on top of the car port. We had a weird basketball backboard that was an entire sheet of plywood mounted to a telephone pole cut in half so there were two poles buried about 3 feet in the ground. It was pulled straight up and laid over. The holes didn't have any twisting damage, they were just empty holes. Some of our shingles were damaged, and we had to have a tarp over that part of the roof for a bit.
As an Aussie that lived in Dallas for five years with my family I remember the community concern that went with the tornado sirens. It seemed surreal, until one day we had a touchdown (and that the NFL type) in our town of Frisco. That same day there was a series of touchdowns all the way to Fort Worth were it took out quite a few windows in the downtown area. My oldest daughter then only about 9 or 10 was traumatised by the experience enough so that when we returned to Australia if my daughter heard a siren she would be on the verge of tears. BTW in Australia there we have a word for them that originates in one of the aboriginal languages. We call them a "Willy Willy." But you are correct it is very rare that a tornado here is remotely like one that is the norm in tornado alley.
I had heard about dust devils and willy willies in Australia before but growing up in school you always thought that they were something that happened in the outback. Then I think two years ago was the first time I ever heard of a tornado ever hitting an Aussie town, then we had another one last year. Coupled with the sudden earthquake that hit us down here in Melbourne I swear we're running out of luck when it comes to the weather, we use to have it so good, aside from the heat, rain and occasional cyclone
Sydney often gets "hook ecchos" on radar, but they are always rain wrapped and reported as "damaging winds." Australian meteorologists didn't pay any attention until a visiting US weather expert saw the tornadic signature on the radar while visiting. Going back through the recordings in the 80s and 90s (when this occurred) there were dozens of hook echos. Located between the Blue Mountains and the Pacific, Sydney is possibly a mini Tornado Alley.
It may become a thing, there are the blue mountains then the land to the west which somewhat mirrors the geography of the states, at the moment I assume the southern ocean is too cold to generate things but time will tell?
While not very common, there are some areas in Germany do get relatively frequent tornadoes, for European standards that is. I lived in Nettetal , which is in an area that would see a tornado capable of doing actual damage about once a year. And every few years one of those would flatten a few farms and kill a few people. Thankfully, so far none ever hit any city or village in that area.
@@TheCangar m.ua-cam.com/video/6wUnuXpZ2ww/v-deo.html This is one that happened in 2018 pretty close to where I lived. That was an F2. Thankfully it did not really hit anything and only took a few roof with it and injured few people.
@@TheCangar Duisburg 2004. Ripped right through the city center and I was in the middle of it. Took maybe half an hour and afterwards the city looked like a war zone. All the trees were uprooted, cars smashed and many roofs were gone. Fortunately nobody got severely hurt. Good thing our houses weren’t made of cardboard.
@@manlymcmanface9932 Cardboard?!... No man... here in North America we built with OSB and other engineered wood products 😌 designed to leave voids for survivors when the Earth shrugs or gawd vacuums... only good ol' American quality here...
I went outside to check the weather since there were no sirens alerting us. It was raining green leaves, and I saw a large piece of corrugated steel spinning 50 feet in the air. I stood in awe for a moment, but then I quickly ran inside to warn everyone to take cover. Unfortunately, many people lost their lives that day.
I grew up and still live in Germany, and my parents always told me tornadoes don't happen in Germany Everytime I saw a tornado documentary as a kid. I told them they could always happen but they wouldn't be strong and they didn't believe me. Last year we had two tornadoes in Germany that made it to the news and even though they are nothing compared to the ones in America, I was right! Now they listen to me with the probabilities of things. Thankfully we weren't hit and we donated to the people whose houses were destroyed. Keep safe everyone!
We get em here in Ontario as well, mostly little ones but its enough of a risk that we had tornado drills growing up. I had a weird obsession with tornadoes as a kid, i think i watched wizard of oz too young and figured "welp guess i have to be prepared to save my family from a tornado"
I was working near Ear Falls, ON in 2009 when that F2 killed three men from Oklahoma staying at a fishing camp. The sky that night was insane and still hard to believe.
Well if you continue the US-Canada border out west in a straight line east, basically 90% of Ontario's population is south of there. So makes sense (I live in Metro Detroit)
I grew up in Georgia, and I remember one time when my dad and I were going fishing and I wanted to ride in the back of the truck bc it was so hot out, like 94 degree deep south summer day. It started to hail, which is a consequence of the super hot moist air rising high up into the clouds and freezing, creating a vortex. When it does that, you figure out where you need to be, because most of the time it means there will be a tornado. My mom always told me a story of a tornado that seemed to break up like 50 yards from our home. She grabbed my brother and I and she threw us in a bath tub and put a crib mattress on top of us. Luckily it disappeared before hitting my house, but I remember seeing the gap in the pecan orchard across from my house when I was growing up.
@@YeetLord666 oh ok, i was just curious. my grandparents live in ringgold and they had a tornado a few years back and i can still see its path on the side of the hills
@@Kanitoxx yes it's my opinion and I still like the videos on the channel. But if you have ever seen the best interviewers work then you must understand that Joe and the one from RMC channel and many others are just not in the same league... But if they want to try, that's fine by me. Keeps them from getting bored with the main content 😀
@@bzuidgeest yeah, interviewing is a skill, but no one is born with it fully developed, you have to hone it with practice. And what better practice than interviewing people? Your first complete denial is what made your opinion a bad opinion... I want Joe to interview all kinds of people. Even if he's not that good at it
My wife and I were huddled under our stairs during one of the few tornadoes to come through Chicago. She was 7 months pregnant. Our son has always been terrified of tornadoes even though we've never talked about them and he's never experienced even a watch. He'd ask every night before bed if there'd be a tornado. We had him in therapy for it from age of 7 to 10.
My first tornado I remember being in was when I was about 6-7. I was born in Kansas City, MO and I lived in an apartment complex. I remember being terrified of the winds and my big sister held me while I was likely screaming and crying when all of a sudden, a huge boulder the size of about a beach ball came crashing through the window. My main memory from that day was just being in shock of how a big rock that size could have been lifted by nothing but wind and hurled through the window. No surprise to me now, but at the time it was crazy to me to see it move entire cars and tear down trees, etc. I know that it had come from about 50 yards away cause it was this big painted rock that lined the driveway entrance to the development. I have been back to visit since and have pictures. That's how I know the approx. distance because this happened in the 80 's and I was really young. It's a force like no other I have ever seen and I moved to the east coast where I grew up and have seen my fair share of hurricanes since and even got trapped in one about 25 years ago, but they don't even scare me the way tornados do. I also when I was visiting family there in the summer of '94 (Gladstone, MO actually just on the outskirts of KC). I was a teenager and I took my brother's bike out for a ride, when I noticed the sky got dark, the wind got completely calm for a moment, and the next thing I knew I was getting pelted with hail larger than golf balls, they were so destructive they were busting people's windshields on their cars and leaving huge dents in them as well. It was followed with tornados too, but I hauled a** back to my brother's house. I have never seen a twister with my own eyes and don't really want to. but I've seen quite a bit of footage of storm chasers and amateurs and these things devastate entire towns. Screw that. I feel bad for all those people that have lost everything being in their direct path, with nowhere to hide.
It's the randomness that's so bad. You can track a hurricane pretty accurately now, but twisters still pop up like jack-in-the-boxes out of basically nowhere and then skitter across the land with no rhyme or reason...
Weather nerd here. Very great and informative video. However, the part with europe has some flaws ( as well as middle east). The first flaws are with the reports. Europe averages 700 tornado reports each year, based on ESWD Data. Two highest was 2021 with 975 reports & 2017 with 915 reports. Although most of them are tornadoes over water, it's still counted in the frequency and total reports. Another flaw was the UK part. In 2014, ESSL released a climatology of tornado reports in europe, reported to ESWD. In that climatology, germany has the most tornadoes per area, with 50 - 100 tornadoes per 10.000km2, expanding across the west side of germany into belgium and netherlands. Another 50 - 100 tornadoes per 10.000 km2 area was noticed in the german/czech republic border and another in south-west. The UK had 20 - 50 per 10.000 km2 at highest. That's equal to denmark, poland, france and many more. The average with 20 - 50 can be argued. Although it's the estimate, a more likely number is 15 - 20, as that's the typical amount reported in a year to ESWD from the UK. Most of the tornadoes are weak, but in reality, most are across the world (incl us). For example, if you compare the 15 - 20 a year in the UK to certain states, the frequency in terms of weak and strong tornadoes close to be the same. Europe have its own alley as well. Another flaw was related to middle-east. Although it is true to some extent, turkey should be excluded there. ESWD has recieved a total of 645 tornado reports from turkey, as of today, march 8. In january, 2019, a cyclic supercell produced 11 tornadoes in the antalya area, claiming the lives of a few. Highest rated being rated F2. ESWD also counts report in certain nations in eurasia, here under the surrounding areas in the med area. Cyprus has seen 141 reports. bonus facts: regarding the russia part at 8:55. That area that see the most tornadoes in russia is of course the european part of russia The part where you never heard about massive tornadoes outside the US can be explained. Most don't know what i call "the hidden tornadoes", as a reference to the fact that they're not heard about often. Palluel, france F5 tornado in the 1960s is a good example. The Holstebro, denmark high-end F3 tornado of 1962 or the Fårvang, denmark high-end F3 tornado of 1963 can also be used as an example. They're put in their own language for tornadoes, making it quite un-noticable for people to read. Denmark it's skypumpe, sweden it's tromb, germany it's windhose. , netherlands it's windhoos, poland it's trąba powietrzna. They're the same thing.
Man, I wanted to look smart and link a Wikipedia article on Wirbelstürme in Deutschland, and then there is already a scientist explaining everything better than I could ever imagine. Where do I go now to try to appear smart?
7:53 "...but, they're very small." So back when I was in late secondary school in England, myself and my friends were out on the playing field and for a few seconds I have my back turned to them as I pick up a ball. I then hear, 'Look, that's a tornado!' and when I turn, there's nothing. My friends all insisted that one had formed only a hundred feet away before dissipating again. So yes, they're not just small: you can almost literally blink and miss them.
I live in MS, tornado alley. Our weather is very unpredictable. For example, the low was 9 degrees, the high was 70 😯. Tornadoes are terrifying, we live in tornado alley. I’ll never forget one that hit the neighbors house, but went over our house. I will never forget the sound. It’s truly like a train, times 1 million. It last for only a second, but something you don’t forget. My husband is Russian, his family is still in the mother land. When the in-laws come visit, they don’t understand what an actual tornado is. It’s so unknown to them that when a siren goes off, I have to explain that getting in the car, to go to tj maxx, is not a good idea.
@@superbeast8373 My apartment was hit by your mom stumbling from the parking lot. The damage was so great they had to rule out the possibility of a tornado.
I was so hyped about him talking to Pecos Hank. I love his UA-cam channel. My tornado story was an F2. We weren't hit very hard, but surrounding neighborhoods weren't so lucky.
I've never understood Midwest thought patterns on that as well, I grew up in Southern California, and my wife is from the Midwest,.so when I first met her family send people from that area, they're like " How does it feel to be safe from all those earthquakes?" My wife was super afraid till she felt her first quake and she barely noticed it, she thought it was a big truck going by our house
Growing up, we moved throughout the Midwest, so I had experienced a lot of bad storms, but my first Earthquake happened a few months after my dad's job moved us to Taiwan in 1999. My 1st quake was a 7.6 magnitude! I couldn't believe how long it lasted, the ground felt like jello, being stuck alone on the 4th floor of our townhouse in the middle of the night. Left huge cracks in the wall & caused a lot of damage all over the country. I didn't sleep for days, because every time I tried, there was an aftershock. Was a bad introduction to quakes!
Midwesterner here. I think quakes and tornadoes are equally frightening. When I lived in FL for a couple of years, they regale you with hurricane stories. I wasn't impressed. They forecast those suckers days in advance.
I think in either direction the problem is only the big ones tend to make the news and have movies made about them. The vast majority are small and only cause minor, if any, damage.
The most ground shake I've ever felt was caused by a cargo train driving by at speeds just a couple feets away (about 10ft away), while walking with a group.
As someone whose lived in both areas I would say it probably comes down to area of effect, I lived mid west for 20 years and was never impacted by a tornado even though they have hit the towns i lived in, but an earthquake will affect the entire area, so at that point its a gamble of whether it'll be a big one or not, either way it'll hit you, the tornado not likley only possible
The first time I was actually in a tornado was in the desert of southern New Mexico, at an Air Force base we were living on, 1972. Someone pulled the fire alarm while we were in the base theater, and when the exit door was opened we heard the classic roar of a thousand freight trains. Kids started screaming, and a couple of my friends ran to the parking lot and hid next to a car. It touched down in the parade grounds in front of the theater. Pulling that fire alarm was a foolish move; we would have been safer inside, and possibly have been primly unaware. This past spring, I was in my house looking out my back window when I saw the shingles from my roof flying into the yard and getting stuck in trees and the chain link fence. It was an F1 tornado that briefly touched down at several points near the DFW Airport. Quite capriciously, it would damage one or two houses at a time.
I’m from Birmingham, Alabama and tornadoes are definitely going up. Our tornado stories are from April 25th-28th of 2011. We had 15 E4 and E5 tornadoes and 250+ tornadoes just on the 27th. I remember hearing the news on my dad’s hand held radio (we didn’t have power). It sounded like a war zone. Neighbors were pulling people out of ruble with missing limbs. They had to bring in cadaver dogs at one point to try and find all the missing people.
*"Microburst"* .. that's what they called it when half the homes in my area, Lexington, KY, in the 80's were damaged with so much insulation blown everywhere that it looked like a pink snowstorm. No one lost their life, thank God. I remember the police cordoned off the area and I had to prove with my driver's license I lived there. It was surreal.
A microburst is a real thing and is different from a tornado. I work at the Atlanta airport and the other week we had a microburst here that grounded all flights for a couple hours. They typically don't cause any damage to anything on the ground but are deadly to aircraft.
Got caught outside in a couple of microbursts, literally went from 60 MPH to 0 in seconds, with the chassis pushed against the rubber stops. Felt like the hand of an angry god pushing the vehicle down. One was a station wagon, the other a full size Ford service van. The latter requiring my unthreading a tree from the grille and driveshaft. Basically, it's a cloud falling on you, bringing the air with it. Had a tornado chase me out of Huntsville, AL back in the early '80's, one trying to form over my head at Ft Indiantown Gap (strong winds blowing through the gap in the three mountains disrupted it, after it drifted north past the three mountains, it touched down and wiped out a farm) and some touching down in our parish, one touching down after we left a town in Texas. Frankly, I think our ancestors fouled up when they stepped off of the battlestar... ;)
Not tornado related, but I dated someone that had a private plane crash in their yard while they were at work. She definitely had to show ID and other proofs of residence to get home. I think they ultimately didn’t allow her home for a couple of days cause plane parts in her driveway or something
Tornadoes are the reason why I even know what Insulation was, when I was a kid at the end of the 90's we literally saw that shit all over the place after the may 3rd tornado that wrecked moore OK.
@@KaiserMattTygore927 I learned what insulation was in the '70's, during the energy crisis, when I helped Dad install it throughout the house. Around 2013, we had an energy audit of the house and despite a cracked window, they found no improvement in insulation was possible.
I'm from Venice (Italy) and in 1970 we had a freak tornado that hit the lagoon at peak force and literally lifted and threw a waterbus full of people, killing 21 on the spot. Unremarkable if not for the setting I guess but you know... Tornadoes in Europe, we do have them.
In Poland there have been like 5-6 big tornado outbreaks in the last 20 years. The biggest one I can think of was last year in February in Kraków during a week of massive storms in Poland. It ripped apart several buildings, torn roofs of a couple dozen and even killed a some people. Another major one was in 2017 in Bory Tucholskie. It carved a half mile wide corridor through a forest and landed straight on a camp ground, killing two girls, trapping several children in debris and wounding 29 people overall. There was also a tornado outbreak in southern Poland in 2008 with multiple F3 tornadoes that killed 4 people and injured over 50. Overall tornadoes aren't that common here, but storms are. We've been getting some pretty hectic storms in the last 10 years like the one in 2017 that caused the tornado in Bory Tucholskie. It went through the whole country with 75-90 mph wind and massive rainfall that caused floods, and overall it caused some 14 million USD in property damage... We've been getting hurricane level winds pretty much yearly these past decade, we've been getting heatwaves, droughts, floods, and tornadoes have been popping up more.
Growing up in eastern Kansas in the 60's we had weekly storm systems during spring and fall which were usually severe but over time this changed and now we hardly see severe weather and the weather patterns have shifted to Missouri (we are 30 miles from there).
I lived in Atchison in the late 60s-early 70s. I don't remember too many tornado warnings. However, when I lived in Topeka in the early 70s I remember tornado warnings every week.
The only time I experienced something like a tornado was when I was living in Germany in 1995. A thunderstorm pulled through the area, which was nothing unusual in June. We had a friend over for tea and recommended them to have an extra cuppa while waiting for the storm to pass. She decided to do so and as we made an extra pot of tea the typical thunderstorm gusts became a monotonous road. Walking into the living room of our 2nd story apartment on the edge of a forested area, the view from the windows was gone and replaced with a fierce horizontal hailstorm. It lasted some 2 or 3 minutes and then it quitted down as quickly as it had come. After finishing our tea and cake I decided to have a look outside to see whether there was any damage. There wasn't any to our home, nor our neighbouring homes, but some 100 meters beyond our home a deep cut was visible into the forest where a whole line of trees had been shredded over a length of some additional 100m.
When I was 3, and I actually remember this day, my mom was picking me up from daycare in Little Rock Arkansas, a tornado touchdown across the street and almost took out the daycare. There was a basement that all the kids and parents hid in and I remember leaving and see all the trees and street lights thrown everywhere. 3 years later I was living in Paris Tx and a tornado hit outside of town which was on my bus route. See that again reminded me off how little we were in control of nature.
Damn Joe, you were on fire with the wit in this one! Back when I lived in the Florida Keys we would pop outside if the winds were low enough (I mean flying debris is less of a worry when you can stand in the road and see two oceans). Of course living on an island, we could see plenty of waterspouts, sometimes several at a time...sometimes in a circle around us. (Like I said, 2 oceans.) Still wasn't a bad place to live as a kid.
Huh, apparently Canada ranks second to the US in tornadoes per year, which really isn't surprising since we are all the North American landmass. We even had one EF5 in Manitoba, but the majority are EF0 to EF2. There was a tornado in Vancouver last year and one here in my hometown of Victoria in 2020. The Vancouver one was caught it on video. Both were EF0 but still enough to do some property damage. But funny story, when I was 5, the street i lived on was not paved yet. It wasn't quite a dirt road, it had been oiled and gravelled. It was summer and it was hot and dry and the wind whipped up what we called a dirt devil. That might not be the right name for it but it was a small (4 foot high) swirl that looked more like the tasmanian devil from the cartoon than a tornado. But to my 5 year old self and my friends, we started screaming "Tornado!" and ran for the front steps and held onto the railing so we wouldn't get blow away.
Yes, the Vancouver video is one of the best tornado videos on the internet (at present). Check it out. Look up tornado UBC Vancouver. (sorry can't link it)
I grew up in Northern Minnesota and my mother's house was destroyed by an EF-3 tornado back in 2012. That storm produced a lot of tornados in North Dakota, Minnesota, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario.
Had a tornado here in northern Germany. Heard of it back then but never thought much of it. Years later I moved to an apartment and then found out that that tornado happened right here. Damaged neighboring buildings and destroyed lots of cars of the Porsche store across the street. And then there was even a flooding.
I live in Illinois. Last year we had a tornado rip through our town. My property backs on to a main road. The tornado basically went across that road behind my house, and left my neighborhood untouched. The neighborhood on the other side wasn’t so lucky. I ended up with a random tree in my front yard and pieces of a roof or multiple roofs in my back yard. No damage to my house though. Or even to my trees. To this day I have no idea who’s yard that tree came from, but I’m just glad it didn’t land on my roof because that was a big old oak tree. And as my house is an old ranch house built in the 50’s, that tree would’ve gone right through my whole house and destroyed it. So yeah, it landed in my front yard, it did some minor landscape damage and some minor damage to my front step. Nothing some grading didn’t fix, and the plants grew back in fine. But it was a surreal situation. It happened late at night. It must have been around 10-11 pm when the siren went off and then my phone went off too. My husband was just getting ready for bed, and I yanked him out of the bedroom and dragged him and the dogs in to our mud room. It’s literally the ONLY room in the house that doesn’t have windows. We sat there with our animals and phone chargers. The rain started coming down, then the lightning started. Couldn’t see it, but you could feel the whole house shake with each strike. Then the hail started, and that was louder than the rain. The wind picked up. And then it got eerily quiet and all of a sudden it sounded like a freight train barreling down. I could feel the whole house moving, heard the joists groaning under the strain. The dogs also went very quiet and basically sat on us. Even the cats came and hid with us and the dogs rather than in their hiding places. Then the power went out. Our phones started blaring again. By this point it was basically barreling past our property. The tornado sirens outside were going off, but you couldn’t even hear them at this point anymore over the sound of this runaway freight train coming past. The sirens went off about 4-5 more times on our phones. It was very surreal and scary. At first my husband was a little blasé about it, but now that we’ve gone through our first “big one” (it wasn’t that big but it was plenty big for our European senses lol), he does react more promptly to hearing the siren going off and is more serious about it. For me, this was my second tornado. First one was when I was on vacation in Texas when I was 18, and I had to hide in some random persons shelter at their house. When I tell you those people DRAGGED me in to their storm cellar when those sirens went off, I’m not even close to kidding. They didn’t know me from Adam, nor I them, and they just went “nope, you’re coming to hide in here! You ain’t dying on our watch Missy!” Still grateful to those people. So I had a bit more experience with what a tornado can do than my hubby. Safe to say he learned a valuable lesson that day. If I run to the basement and yell “NADER! Get in the basement NOW!” you get your behind in the basement 😂
I've lived in Southern Illinois at the edge of the Shawnee National Forest since 1970 and I've been through my fair share of tornadoes. We also get hit by the remains of hurricanes- Isaac being a not so recent example that downed aa lot of trees on the western edge of the SNF However, the May 8th Derecho of 2009 was the most destruction I've ever seen- we were fortunate not to have lost our roof, and that utilities were restored in our area in about two weeks.
From the UK here. There’s an area of the sea off the east of England called The Wash, my grandad was a fisherman and he’d tell me the stories of encountering water spouts in that area of the sea. He said it would happen a lot often than you think! 🙂
I’m from Texas and my grandfather used to tell a story about coming outside after a tornado and finding an intact tire wrapped around the base of a fully grown tree. I’ve personally been through three tornadoes outside, a couple under a bridge and one I was in a ditch when I went over me.
Having spent a good portion of my life in the Midwest, I've had a few encounters. The most memorable was watching these wisps of cloud extending down from the dark grey mass above. They were twirling around as if dancing. I couldn't help myself. I ran across the road into the field to look up into what i assumed would be a vortex. Thankfully, there was no vortex. Yet. The tornado touched down about 2 miles to the east in Gary, In. I was an the phone to my locaĺ 911 dispatch the whole time. I know i sounded like a lunatic trying to describe to him what i was seeing and my girlfriend wouldn't give it up for like a week, saying i scared her so bad for running TOWARDS a tornado. Only a true storm nut would understand... Love you, bro!
I have slept through every tornado that's come nearby overnight, including one that wrecked everything less than a hundred yards from the mobile home I grew up in. But, BUT, the slightest noise IN my room, like an adolescent opossum, will wake me up.
I live in Moore as well, Its been close a couple of times. So far I haven't lost anything yet. Last one got within .8 miles pretty dang close. I hope you were able to recover.
Grew up in California, moved to Texas. I've always been more terrified of tornados than earthquakes. Maybe because I've been through several small earthquakes and not any small tornados
If you grow up in the midwest, you get the really apathetic people who will mow their lawn while a tornado is VISIBLE in a field a short distance away (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, ALBERTA MAN). Sometimes you can clearly have a warning they are coming and go chill in the basement, and you can go stare in awe at them safely.... it's those fast and unexpected ones you have to watch out for.
The best time was when my wife and I had to scramble to our car during a company softball game. We watched the port-a-potty in front of us just fall down and pop up like a bowing person a dozen times. Totally wild. I wish I had pulled out my phone to record it.
I can’t remember ever having a tornado in the City of New Orleans, until a shortly after Katrina. It imploded all the window glass in my brothers house into the house as it passed, everyone was asleep and woke up to noise and flying window glass. Amazingly no one was hurt. Had to get a garden rake to start removing the broken glass.
I was told you want to leave a couple windows open if a tornado is heading your way so the pressure differential doesn't make windows or sometimes the whole house implodes.
We had a tornado run through Elgin SC in the early 2000's that cut a line through the treetops for over a mile. You can still see where it happened, theres a channel through the woods running along the side of a couple roads where ALL the trees are cut off about 20 - 30 feet up. It also made an old block building vanish... like nothing left but the concrete slab in the whole 2 acre field. It took all the blocks somwhere else.
Watching this honestly made me thankful I live in NY state! The closest I’ve ever come to witnessing a real tornado was driving through some powerful downspouts (the beginning of cyclonic activity for those who may be uninitiated) on my way through Syracuse on my way home to Binghamton a few years back. It was at night, and although I pride myself on my ability to act quickly to be able to counter against the winds until I could safely pull over to collect myself, (there were also huge branches and limbs in the road being thrown everywhere) I have to admit that a brush even that slight with tornadic activity like that was truly terrifying! Thanks for another great video, Joe!
I've seen dozens of tornadoes personally. For me the "big one" was the Joplin, Missouri tornado of 2011. It was an F5. Nearly a mile wide. 200 mph winds. I also saw one in Kansas on my way to Colorado. It wasn't particularly large though. It was less than a mile away to the south of the highway while I drive west. Lasted for probably 15 minutes.
The entire time I was watching this I was just thinking about the Joplin tornado. I was scared shitless of tornados before that, but the coverage of the aftermath of that on ky3 solidified my fear of them forever.
I’ve actually been “hit” by 3 tornadoes, one (EF-3) of which severely damaged my home. The other two were small but still frightening. I think that Europe’s saving grace is the Alps and Carpathians. Any air being advected from the Mediterranean into continental Europe experiences isentropic lift when it crosses the mountains and this squeezes most of the moisture from it. The warm moisture of the Gulf and the Mediterranean are necessary for the energy that rises in updrafts to create supercells that are strong enough to generate tornadoes. Spain, southern France, Italy, and Greece are wide open to that warm, moist Mediterranean air and cold continental air also gets the drying treatment which makes it very inviting for rising parcels of surface air that cause supercells.
Let us also not forget that the waters of the Atlantic Ocean that face western Europe, unlike the eastern seaboard of the USA, are not fed by tropical warmth, which is why you all rarely, if ever, get hurricanes, and that the Mediterranean, Tyrrhenian, Adriatic, Ionian, Aegean, Alboran, Balearic, and Black Seas are not enough warm water moisture, let alone a strong enough source of warm water currents, as well as air, to override the frigid waters of that part of the Atlantic Ocean, as well as the Arctic Ocean, the Bay of Biscay, the Celtic Sea, the English Channel, the Irish Sea, the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Bothnia, the Norwegian Sea, the Barents Sea, the Kara Sea, Skagerrak, Kattegat, the Gulf of Finland, the Gulf of Riga, and a whole bunch of smaller bays, as well as freshwater lakes, rivers, streams, creeks, and a whole bunch of frozen tundra, as well as the winds and temperatures that accompany them as well.
that’s a good explanation tbf However most strong tornadoes happens north of the alps especially in poland, germany, france, belgium & netherlands Even denmark have up to 15 tornado reports a year
@@hvadskalvihedde2512 I’m thinking that tornadoes in Northern Europe are likely a result of strong shear with limited instability. Dixie Alley gets a lot of this type of tornadoes in winter and they often reach EF3 and even EF4 strength. I don’t expect dew points above 60F to occur often in Europe but latitudes above 50N probably have some hellacious 850mb winds.
You might have something there. I've been through a bunch, but where I live at now we have Signal Mountain on one side, and a lot of low hills on the other, and we have had tornados literally swing around Red Bank and hit in Chattanooga. Several. Yay mountains.
I’ve never been hit by one. The closest was 3 miles for me. And I had zero warning of it so I slept right through it. It wasn’t up to an ef3 at that point but still freaky. Just a small change in wind somewhere down the line and that would’ve been on top of me and I would be very dead. A few years before in 2019 there was a 1.5 mile wide tornado that went somewhere around 10 miles nor the of me. I checked on google maps and the only damage I saw was a big chunk of forest taken down because the latest data was a year later. Nobody died in both but they always cry about it and call it a tragedy. If you take storms seriously and don’t convince yourselves the tiny itty bitty mountains that are east of you will stop tornadoes coming from the west you are wrong. Get to shelter during tornado warnings and you’ll be fine.
I just lived through the tornado that hit Mayfield, Ky. The destruction of our downtown is hard to wrap my head around. I've never experienced anything like it. It destroyed a lot of lives, but there are some things that were just really weird. For example, the tornado took my flower pot but left the dirt that was in it sitting in the same exact spot that the pot was in. How random is that?
I remember one in Montana when I was a kid...in the mountains no less which I know is super rare. We were camping and had to ride it out. The next day my dad took us out to look at the damage and I specifically remember seeing just perfect paths/swaths of trees just simply gone or destroyed. I was super young, late 80's? Only thing I remember is we all got into the Bronco (as opposed to our tents) and spent the night in there (mom, dad and 4 kids and I was the oldest at maybe 10?) and the Bronco was rocking like crazy. I was old enough to remember the swath the tornado cut was only a few hundred feet from us. Looking back I bet my dad was scared sh*tless but at the time he was all like "don't worry about it, you'll be fine". lol
Yeah, tornados are kinda rare here in Montana, but they happen. Problem is, since they are so rare here, most buildings (at least in the western-half) aren't built with the typical fortifications you'd see in places where tornados are far more frequent; storm cellars aren't exactly commonplace by any stretch. We had an almost tornado that just didn't quite make touchdown over by the next town over. That did everyone a concern.
Mom & Dads just be like that. Back when kids could ride up front, if we stopped suddenly, there would always be an arm out stopping us from falling forward. Instinct to protect and prevent panic.
@@DraptorRonin it seems odd to hear you talking about tornado areas having fortified houses. From an international perspective they look like they are built of kindling. Normal houses are brick here, houses in cyclone prone areas are full steel frame with bars tying the whole thing into the foundations and multiple reinforcements.
As someone from the UK, I think we often take our characteristically "miserable" and "boring" weather for granted. Sure, whilst it may not be the best at times, at least we don't have massive hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc. It's a good thing that the worst we get over here is the heatwaves, occasional late / early-year storms, as well as flash flooding because, honestly, it could be a whole lot worse, and I'm terrified for what the weather could become if climate change continues
We had two tornados go through Springfield, Illinois on the same route two weeks apart in March of 2006. The first of these did considerable, but not catastrophic damage to some areas of our town. It was unusual in that it was massive, nearly a mile wide, but the winds were relatively slow, just an F1 or lower in most places, although in some areas it got up to F2 or F3 briefly, and there were a couple homes and businesses that were essentially leveled. The thing I noticed was the extremely rapid drop in air pressure as the tornado went over us. Our ears popped hard during the seconds when the tornado passed over our home. And also, it was very loud.
The big one here was Black Friday, July 31, 1987. F4 tornado ripped through Eastern Edmonton, destroyed a good quarter of industrial property, ripped through a trailer park. Killed 27 people. The story I always remember is a steel foremen being sent out to the yard to inspect something just before the storm hit... No one ever saw him again, or his remains
Yup, I was in Sherwood Park at the time. It was coming right at us before it died out. Can recall watching the bushes in our backyard getting torn from the ground and my mother said “basement now!”.
I was 11 when the 1965 "Palm Sunday" tornado outbreak happened. I lived in Michigan, and we were just on the edge but I still have a fear of wind blowing at night...55 confirmed tornadoes, 450 miles long path, 266 deaths. I remember we went out driving around the next day to see what it had done, and seeing some things that are still clear in my memory; an aluminum fishing boat wrapped around a tree like a bow tie. Long lines of 50' tall oak trees laid down in neat rows. Another tornado left someones roof gable floating in the lake by our dock. I will still move back to my home state this summer, but you have to be realistic and prepared.
Once while listening to a BBC radio broadcast when I lived in Central Europe, the speaker was going on about how he thought that the weather in England was the most exciting in the world. As an American from the Midwest, my reaction was, 'hold my beer.'
Last tornado I heard of in my relatively small Dutch city of Utrecht was 350 years ago and it's still a big part of what shaped the central architecture of the city. That's how often we get 'em
I've been through a few, having lived in various parts of Tornado Alley for most of my life. Nothing traumatic as yet from them, though. Walked home once when they closed work over it and I didn't drive at the time. Half a mile with multiple tornadoes headed in my direction, but I was more concerned with getting back to my apartment so my puppy wouldn't be scared. 🤷♀️
Being European, I've never seen a tornado in my life, excepting the small dustdevils you get in autumn that are (at most) a metre tall. We have incredibly few natural disasters here. But tornadoes have always scared the bajeezus out of me though, and I couldn't imagine being able to sleep soundly living in tornado country. Between the tornadoes, volcanoes, tsunamis and earthquakes - I'm suprised you guys don't perpetually live in fear.
I'm "European ' too and yeah be happy ya hadn't to endure it. it's pur terror to be in a shtf situation like a tornado flashflood, high water, landslide, thunderstorm with hail big as tomatoes and even earthquakes we may not having it often but depending on the area in Europe you're living, chances are you will have to endure some shtf situation once or twice in your life.
“I’m surprised you guys don’t perpetually live in fear.” They do. That’s what the guns are for, I guess. 🤷♂️ I recommend being more surprised that they haven’t appointed someone to be “in charge” of tornadoes so that they have a figure to blame and complain to when a twister causes destruction. That’s the American way of dealing with fear. 😏
@@chriskaprys hell yeah sure they will find a Karen to run her trap about shit lol fun a side old wisdom and today's knowledge with a pinch of objectively is a better option than fear stubbornness and stupidity
Americans do live in perpetual fear. From the government and each other. Why do you think they are so desperate to own all those guns? Oops someone already said that. O well
I was born in Waco and grew up all in and around Dallas, I feel you Joe. And I now live in California, far from serious earthquake radius, and I enjoy watching Pecos Hank knowing I am safe and sound.
in summer of 2019 there was actually one kinda "major" tornado in Europe in Luxembourg, that passed right in front of my house. it is the only tornado in europe i have ever heard of in my life to actually cause significant material damage as it plowed through 2 towns breaking windows, stripping roofs off of building and breaking a few electricity masts. it was still tiny compared to some of those you get in the US.
I Love Pecos Hank's videos! I have been watching him for years! Back in High School (sometime around 1983 I think)(I think I was about 16 years old), on a stormy night in Decatur, Ga., my dad and I drove from our house to downtown to pick up my mother from work. There was heavy rain all of the way there, my dad took his time getting there. Almost as soon as we reached the center of Downtown, the Tornado Sirens started going off. We turned the radio to a news channel and they were reporting a tornado near downtown. We missed the location, so once we picked up mom, we started heading back home. Suddenly, it started down pouring like I had never seen it! Down pouring rain, some hail, strong winds that were blowing the truck almost off the road. The three of us were terrified! Then almost as suddenly, things were back to the normal heavy rainfall. I don't think we were "in" the tornado, but my dad and I came to the conclusion that we must have been very close to it.
Story from Canada. I remember when I was like 6 or 7, we used to camp at a place near Lake Huron out in the countryside, and it was really windy. I didnt know what was going on, but my mother was visibly spooked as she forced to me to get into a friends tent to weather the storm (There were no proper buildings within like 300 metres of us. We just played Uno while the tent was shaking from the very strong winds. I dont know why I didnt think much of it, but I was too busy playing Uno with a friend to really be scared. It was only a few years later when I asked about it did I learn it was a tornado! Yippee! I wish I could recall more, but it was a long time ago, still dont know why I was not that freaked out about it tho.
I have family in Oklahoma City and saw a special on TV from a well-known weatherman who covers that area, talking about the F5 that hit OKC in 1999, I think. As the storm was developing, he went through some of the standard check list comments like telling people to go to an interior room and not to try to outrun the storm in one's car, but as it grew to F5 territory he realized that going to an interior room wouldn't help and actually told people to flee in their vehicles. The storm scrubbed everything down to the foundation level, which in that part of the country generally means a slab. My niece was going to OU at the time and working part time as a waitress and she and all the customers stood at the window of the restaurant to watch as this monster was doing its damage in the distance. Since then, Moore (part of greater OKC) has been hit multiple times by severe tornados.
I remember that tornado. I was a Sr in HS, and I lived about an hour south of there. Watched it happen in real time on the news. One of my BFFs was also attending OU at the time, and I went to visit him that weekend. (The trip was planned before the tornado.) The damage was really bad. It has often been described like a bomb went off and just leveled everything. Unfortunately, that's exactly what it looked like. And, what made it even worse is the fact that the bedrock is super hard there, so basements and storm shelters that are located completely underground are extremely rare. And, with an F5, a shelter that's only partially underground won't really do any good. So, I'm not at all surprised people were told to run.
I miss Garry England. He was amazing, plaza towers broke him. I had an employee in the school with her kids, I sent her home to get them. I was in the restroom with the rest of my crew doing my best to keep them calm as it passed. We could feel the air pressure like a heartbeat. Luckily we didn't get hit. I remember not being able to call anyone. We immediately started coffee and food for first responders, and became a staging center for donations.
@@lemmypop1300 I know, dude :) I'm from Croatia. I wrote the dates the USA way because I guess the others wouldn’t understand. Cheers and all the best !!!
@@jukicdalibor Kako si mogao da ti iz Hrvatske počiniš takav ustupak američko-imperijalnom nazadnjačkom sistemu? EU se vrti u grobu... ovaj, glasno negoduje :) Metric & day first dates all the way!
I know I'm late, but +1 for Pecos Hank (love his channel!). Growing up in Wisconsin and now living in Minnesota, we're not strangers to tornadic storms (though certainly not like TX/OK/KS) I've had a few close calls though thankfully have avoided being in a tornado. A friend of mine however was ripped from her Mother's arms when she was an infant. They found her some time later, bundled up and unharmed in a field. To hear her or her Mother tell the story is one of the wildest things. I can only imagine what that experience was like.
Not only America and Bangladesh have had EF/F5 tornadoes. France, Germany, Canada, Italy and Russia also had several in their history. There also are some suspected cases in Poland and China, for example. Europe sees an F4 tornado every few years, and an F5 tornado every few decades. Parts of Europe such as the UK, the Netherlands and northern Germany have more tornadoes per square kilometer than the US. Especially in europe's tornado alley (ranging from France, the BENELUX-countries, Germany and Poland all the way into western Russia) aswell as in China, tornadoes get as strong and huge as tornadoes in the US and regularly cause dozens of injuries and deaths.
@@bodombeastmode Thats true, most torneadoes in europe aren't long-tracked. Powerful tornadoes in europe usually travel somewhere between 5km (3mi) and 40km (25mi). However, there are exceptions. The frequency of F5 tornadoes in America is way higher. Which is somewhat logical since there are more than three times as many tornadoes here every year as, for example, in Europe. In addition, ideal conditions regularly prevail in America, which is the absolute exception in Europe. I certainly didn't want to discredit America as the number one tornado country, but tornadoes in other specific parts of the world shouldn't be underestimated.
I had half my roof ripped off in the Netherlands when I still lived there. Freak tornado came through, took half my roof tiles with it, and then proceeded to flatten an entire farm on the other side of the lake down to its foundations. That was the first tornado I had ever even heard of in the Netherlands, and I was born and raised there. This happened I guess maybe 7-8 years ago? From my experience we mainly had nasty “northeastern” storms that would wipe out half the coastline if not the entire coastline way up in to the dunes. But that’s a storm you actually go out to watch. My dad would drive us down to the coast and we’d sit in the car just watching these giant waves crashing in to the dunes. We wouldn’t be in any immediate danger like tornado chasers are, but I still wouldn’t recommend taking a walk in that weather as you could easily get overpowered by a wave and drown.
@@annebell565 That storm would have been more akin to a hurricane than a tornado. We regularly get the afters of the USA's hurricane season, and they are just exceptionally strong storms. Seldom do they spawn tornadoes, though, if at all.
I worked in a liquor store when I experienced my first tornado in Tennessee. My coworkers said "this is the best place to be during a tornado, we can drink the fear away." I had to reply "ah yes, death by a thousand shards of glass" The front doors starting aggressively flapping in the wind. The manager grabbed onto them and got lifted off his feet. That was an exciting time
Growing up in Illinois, went out to watch the lightning one night with some friends as a storm rolled in. Set on the top of a hill west of town, enjoying the show Mother Nature was putting on, the wind went dead, and the lightning seemed to stop. I yelled for everyone to get in the car, that we had to go. A moment later, as I spun the car around to race back to town, the sky opened up. Rain and hail came down so hard, couldn’t even see the end of the hood. We went in and out of the ditches in either side of the road so many times, I don’t know how we didn’t hit anything or get stuck. At one point, I cracked the door to try to figure out where on the road the car was, the wind pushed the door open so hard it yanked me out of the car. We kept moving, painfully slow, driving by braille, as it were, with the right side tires just off the road. The storm passed us by, leaving only the eerie silence that had preceded it. Hail was piling up in tracks on the road as people started moving around again. Some loose lumber at a construction site had been thrown through a neighbor’s garage, embedded in their walls. I don’t recommend chasing storms at night.
I've had a similar experience. On high cliff/hill, watching the lightening over town creeping closer. When it suddenly went quiet and....BOOM! lightening exploded directly over head striking the ground somewhere near by. Never thought I could experience the ground & air vibrating, it was a literal intensive invisible force. We all hit the deck, and I screamed at everyone that we needed to move now and we nope the eff off that hill and back to the car. The moment we slammed the doors, hail & rain like vertical sheets just fell. Bloody scary stuff mother nature, 10/10 would do again.
I live in Claremore, Oklahoma, and recently an EF3 MONSTER came rolling around at around midnight. At the closest, we we're about 2 miles away from it, and I was close enough I could HEAR it ROAR. Debris was flying everywhere, we had 100+ MPH winds, and the rain and hail was the heaviest ever. We almost took shelter in my mom's closet, but thankfully it wasn't headed our direction... My hopes and prayers go out to everyone who actually went into the tornado. God bless them. 💗
"The sky can eat your house" - I've never heard tornadoes described like that, but I think I have a fun new weather phrase.
As someone who was born and raised in Alabama.. I agree.
Now all I need is James Spann to say it 😳🤣
They're just vacuuming, not their fault you didn't pick up your toys
The ground can eat your house in cali
@@ventilate4267 now I know what to tell my nephew in regards to his Legos
@@ventilate4267 I lived in San Diego for a few years.
I'll honestly take my chances here in Alabama 🤔🤣
We've actually had big tornado (EF4) in the Czech rep. last summer. Six people died, ca 1200 houses were damaged and about two hundred of them had to be demolished. But you are right, it's very rare - disaster this big only happened here eleven times that we know of in the last 1000 years
That’s awful, I know there was a tornado in Poland from family a couple of years ago and the people were not prepared because it happen so rarely
1200 houses? That too European construction that uses bricks and concrete unlike American homes, which are made from cardboard.
Does anyone try to shoot at the storm like Yanks apparently do?
video op is a morron, the video is a pure clickbait
@@retrocompaq5212 yeah I think the bangaldesh tornadoes eating is disputed but Argentina and France both have a f5 tornado credit in 1973 and 1967 respectively
@@rustomkanishka Well yeah its an EF4 those can destroy brick houses, and shooting at anything randomly is stupid as they will come back down
Being a European, I've heard about tornadoes in Europe maybe a few times in my life. In Poland we've had like 3-5 in the last 20 years, they damaged a few houses... Basically tornado isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you think about natural disasters in Europe. Floods are the most common ones here probably.
Earthquakes here in southern Italy.
From France, and yeah, droughts and floods are usually the most damaging things. There's been a few tempests that damaged stuff, but they are decennial or just about. We almost never get Earthquakes, tornadoes, and don't have active volcanoes that i know of. All in all it's a pretty priviledged place to be in.
Also aside floods, fast wind and storms are also the most common disasters, usually around mountains.
Czechs had real tornado last year so you might get one in Poland aswell ! Im now little worried every time when storm rolls in. Never though about it like that before last year.
We had one in Hungary last summer
Back when my family used to live in the UK (We're American and my dad was stationed in the UK in the military), we watched Cars when it came out in theaters. My mom always goes on about when Tow Mater said "I'm happier than a tornado in a trailer park!" and my mom would burst out laughing but the rest of the UK theater was stone dead silent.
I'm from the UK, and that sounds like the most American joke I have ever heard in my life, I'm not surprised there was such little reaction!
I can just imagine a tornado in a trailer park just smiling and having a blast tearing shit up 😂
@@the1320brett you remember the titans from the animated Hercules movie?
Yeah, let's go with that guy.💀
Something about the concept of the sky pulling the air out of your lungs so that you hear your own voice as it goes out is just terrifying
I live in Norman, OK, where the National Weather Service is (it's actually about 1/4 mile down the road from my house). Around here we've heard every kind of Tornado story imaginable, especially with Moore, OK being just about 10 miles north. I thought I'd heard it all. But I'd never heard that story of having the air sucked out of your lungs and hearing your own voice howl--you're absolutely right, THAT IS TERRIFYING. Very hard to spook someone from my hometown about a Tornado experience. I'm sufficiently spooked. That's terrifying.
The bear in annihilation..😳🙊
@@melissapyle7879 omg yesss
@@melissapyle7879 ugh omg scariest thing ever for real
I've been through two tornados. The first one occurred when I was about 14 years-old. It literally formed about a half mile from our house, so we had absolutely no warning *(in fact, the tornado sirens didn't go off until it was about a mile past our house).* We had a tornado spot inside our house, but no one had time to get in it. I was reading on Reddit some people talking about how you could tell if the tornado was heading towards you, and someone said that, if it looked like it was standing still, it was coming at you (or going away), and if you could see movement, then you _"could be certain"_ that it was headed away from you. Yeah... *NOTHING is for CERTAIN, when it comes to a tornado.* The tornado that hit us traveled north of our house, and was only 100 yards or so from us (literally eating our neighbor's house - they were both at work so, no injuries). Then, about 20 seconds later, the tornado turned and looped back in the opposite direction on the southern side of our house *(as though it had dropped its keys and was going back to look for them).* 15 or 20 seconds after that, it looped back and retraced its path back over our neighbor's house (it literally circled our house - and the whole time it just kept sucking shingles off our roof (the only damage we took, except for a really nice elm tree my mom had planted on the northside a couple years previously - we never saw it again). No one was killed... quite a few injuries though.
The second tornado occurred when I lived in Virginia. Like the first, we had zero warning before it decided to stroll up our street. I lived in a really quaint, old neighborhood in our town. I was the only one home (because I worked third shift), but I recognized the sound with only about 10 seconds to spare. We had a room for our boiler (we had radiators in the house) that served as our tornado/hurricane room. I went there. Almost as soon as I got there, it passed our house. It jumped the street next to us, flew over a small wooded area then came back down in a retail area and killed one person. I went outside to survey the damage. As it had come up the street, it started lifting in order to jump over the road I mentioned. My house had zero damage, but we lost 3- or 400 singles. *My neighbor, whose house was only 10 feet from mine, had a cedar tree rammed through her front wall.* The neighbor beyond her had part of their roof torn off and other exterior damage. The neighbor beyond them had zero roof and virtually all their top floor furniture was gone... *The next house was completely gone... there was just a slab.* All of the houses past that looked similar until you got to the other end of the street, which mirror imaged the damage on my end. As I said, I worked third shift... I was almost the only person home, everyone else was at work. Additionally, all the kids were at school, which was on the opposite end of our street and took zero damage. *Had the tornado hit only 30 minutes later, all those kids, including my six year-old daughter, would have been walking home or riding the bus directly where the tornado touched down* (I shudder to think that almost every kid could have been killed... making us one of the unluckiest neighborhoods ever - it would have been horrible).
As far as the first bit- yeah, while tornadoes *generally* have a set behavior (tend to move in a particular direction), anyone claiming they "always do X" is full of it. One case study in "Tornado that went against most/all norms" would be the 2013 El Reno tornado. Give that a look - 2.6 mi wide, and it gets worse from there...
Jesus. You sure are getting alot of miles out of those couple little storms...
That’s crazy
@@garethfuller2700 -- Yeah, I've been a subscriber of Pecos Hank for a couple of years now (he's incredible, I love the stuff he does with all the animals too). I like tornado videos so I've seen the El Reno twister from about 20 different chasers. Additionally, the company I used to work for did paintless dent repair, and my job was to literally chase hail storms and help set up shops for us in areas that were hit. In fact, my company had an advertising deal with Twistex (the team who regretfully lost three chasers that day). That was a really bad day.
I strongly believe in safety. I hear that storm shelters are not cost effective in saving lives. I am sure Amazon wear houses could have built a lot of storm shelters. I believe fear factor is well worth the price. Tornadoes are scary as hell and shelters feel good. Just knowing that they are there is a good feeling. Thanks for sharing.
I had no idea that we in the UK had the most tornados per square mile. Though when they happen they tend to be weak and short lived. Media reports are like "A tornado is reported to have struck a street a Coventry. One shaken resident went out to investigate and was nearly hit by a falling roof tile. Several rooves were damaged by the freak weather event, but no one was injured".
“A dust bin was knocked over in Chastbury..”
@@BillyTheKidder By jove, what disaster has befallen our street. My wheelie bin has moved 5 feet from my house!
Haha!
@@carterjones8126 I wonder why they are so weak. Not to complain, I'm glad for you guys. Maybe because the amount of land they travel across is less. In Missouri they've got a good hundred miles to churn over before anything changes. In the '80s this guy was interviewed in his back yard that was completely torn up, and he said, "We're all fine, we all made it to the basement, but I have two new cars in my yard that I've never seen before."
The Netherlands has the highest tornado density per kilometre actualy, with the UK coming in second.
As it happend, there actually was a F2 tornado here in germany in the summer and it was pretty close by in the city of Paderborn. later that day a friend of mine told us that her friend that lives there actually lost their roof and had to stay with her.
Was in Germany when that happened, not far from Paderborn! We thought it was going to hit us at first but it passed by. We certainly saw it forming though
That was the first thing that came to my mind when I read the title of this video. Tornadoe in Germany. Odd, but they do happen there too.
Edit: When I was a kid I thought Quicksand, Terrorists, Snipers, Tornados and Volcanos were going to be major fucking problems.
I was in Turkey in the last 90s and there was a tornado it didn't last long and was lucky if it was above an F1 but i watched it walk down the runway at the air force base I was at. I was also stationed at Wichita falls TX and yeah it was pretty much every night at times we had tornado warnings.
An average of 20 to 60 tornadoes occur in Germany. Our European tornado route often travels from France via Benelux to northern Germany and Poland. (The newspaper Der Stern had a report on the subject)
Tornado alley story - when I was in middle school, we were having football practice in a field, and a funnel cloud started forming directly over our heads. We all panicked and started running, but luckily the funnel dissipated before it touched ground. Needless to say, we still decided it was probably best to cancel practice for the day.
Was there any other weather to hint at it's pending formation?
@@zulimi It was cloudy and felt like a storm was brewing, but there wasn't any lightning yet and just a light drizzle of rain, which is why practice hadn't yet been called off
@@Blate1 That is scary. It can come out of nowhere from mild weather.
That was wild. Where was that at?
@@zulimi hi, another child of the tornado alley here. The sky will take a greenish hue on as well. Though it can be difficult to tell sometimes. What's weird (and a bit scary) is they can come out of nowhere as well. I remember there being days that everything seemed fine in the morning but a tornado will show up just a couple hours later. Alot of people I knew would just keep an eye on the different wind fronts, because you need a cold and hot one clashing for a tornado. The news will even say that it's got the perfect ingredients for a tornado so be prepared just in case.
When I was 6, I was living in Louisiana and a tornado hit my small town and damaged our house while we were in it. We lived on a big lot and lost 45 trees in that one storm. The chimneys made an awful noise like a train was about to hit our living room. Before taking shelter, I saw the twister rip two trees out of the ground and throw them an unimaginable distance. It sucked a concrete slab from our carport out of the ground and deposited across the street in a field. The only fatality was our next door neighbor's dog, who was crushed by debris. After the storm, I walked outside and the smell of sawdust was incredibly strong. There was no sawdust, it was the smell of trees that had been ripped apart. That odor still brings me right back to that day 30 years ago.
There was a “ tornado” in Coventry last fall. Messed up some roof tiles on some houses. It may have tipped over a transit van, but they think that might have been some of the local kids. Nobody was injured. But, apparently that was the biggest UK tornado in decades.
My family used to go on holiday in a static caravan site in Selsey Bill every year for about a decade. There was one change in the entire time; the old caravan we used to rent was replaced with a newer better one. (But the new one still had Pong. That was good.) A few years after we stopped going, (which was also a few years after I'd learned all about tornados in the US,) a tornado ripped through it. Seeing the pictures was very, very surreal.
Selsey Tornado of 1998 is the biggest In the past few decades I believe
Bet everyone in the uk freaked out about this
There was one in King's Heath in Birmingham in 2005 rated as F2 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Birmingham_tornado)
@@holyflowerpots1400 remember that one!
I grew up in central Florida which also gets a lot of tornadoes and every time a storm comes through (so daily for about half a year) you just look at the clouds to check the color and to see if you could spot any funnel clouds forming. Before I started at the local university I went to, a tornado came by on Christmas and completely destroyed a couple of buildings. While I was going there, a microburst blew out a couple of windows in the building I worked in but we were never hit by a tornado.
I was in a faculty writers' group meeting near Nashville, Tennessee in 2006 when the safety officer came by to tell us to get under the table. A minute later, the tornado tore through the campus. Light fixtures and ceiling tiles crashed down, and the building went dark.
Once the all clear was sounded, I went out to the parking lot to see if my truck was still there among the swirled cars. The college president's car was atop a tree, but my truck was gone. I peered across a field to see a greyish lump of metal a couple hundred yards away and realized that I'd need a ride home.
The one bit of good news is that I found out that tornadoes do not sound like trains. They sound like industrial ventilation fans.
Doing a project on tornadoes in high school, my partner said, “We have to go outside for this.” Meaning: what a tornado sounded like to her.
She explained it was one sound she’d never forget, and then proceeded to give voice to something like an avalanche roar and the Nazgul’s unholy shriek. She said she’d heard it as a small child, and was pretty sure the scream was her mother, screaming at the storm when it nearly yanked my classmate from her mother’s arms. Why they were out and caught by the storm, she did not share. Just the sound.
A few years back a EF-0 went through the apartment complex I lived in about 6 am. It woke me up because it sounded just like a freight train going right though the apartment corridor. Thankfully it only did minor damage. I have been though some slightly larger tornadoes, but those were during hurricanes and I could not hear anything different other than the general sound of storm.
The one I was in that went thru down town slc some 20+ years ago really sounded like a freight train going thru to me and just about everyone else that described it lol
Yeah back when my house got nearly ripped down the middle by a tornado, the sound is the one thing that just never leaves your mind.
To me it did sound like a freight train. Not a train you hear these days, but a very angry runaway locomotive freight train that’s howling. Think Thomas the tank engine on steroids in a roid rage induced Wild West howling contest.
When I was a kid, we lived in a mobile home. A tornado hit one night. It lifted our house off the ground a few feet before slamming it back down. It also ripped the roof off of the back half, sending pieces of it all over, including through the windows of neighbors' houses. It was the middle of the night and, being in the middle of the country, there was no warning siren or anything to alert us sooner. Not that we had anywhere else we could go, anyway.
Anyhow, no one was hurt fortunately. I somehow managed to sleep through the whole thing, only realizing something must have happened the next day when all my toys that were on a shelf were now on the floor. It's probably for the best I don't sleep THAT soundly anymore.
The next day when our landlord came out to help clean up, he and my step-dad spent a good hour or two rocking back and forth a 2x4 from our roof that had impaled the ground, blunt-end first, into the dirt about 2 feet.
A tornado just happened without warning? Nobody even heard it?
A tornado just happened without warning? Nobody even heard it?
I enjoyed your comment
A tornado just happened without warning? Nobody even heard it?
A tornado just happened without warning? Nobody even heard it?
Thanks for increasing my existential dread about supervolcanoes
And sailors around our moms
The biggest natural disaster threat potential for the US is probably a super earthquake in the Pacific northwest. The tsunami caused by it could kill millions.
On the bright side, you only die once!
How much did that account cost?
Yeah at least you'll go out with a bang
Not too much to say. I live in SW Michigan and we don't get tornadoes real often. I've been in 3 or 4 here in my hometown. Once we we were driving down the freeway and a rain wrapped funnel formed right over the car. It lifted the vehicle off the ground twice. We felt it bounce each time it dropped it. When I was a young woman one skipped over our house, bye bye chimney, this one came in the night. There were regular drills in the schools so we knew where to go and how to behave. As a young mother my town was hit by an f-3. Three killed and much damage, a church was hit, it was brick and the only thing left was the foundation. Nothing else was ever found, even the bricks were gone. Once you have had a close encounter of the twister type you don't forget it. People who are traumatized by a f-0 or a f-1 will hopefully never live through a bigger one. I saw the damage that a f-5 did. Weather personnel were warning that if you wanted to survive, find a shelter or get below ground. It looked like a mile wide vacuum cleaner went through. To this day I won't buy or live in a home without a basement or shelter.
As someone who lives in California where tornadoes almost never happen, the statement "we don't get tornados real often" next to "I've been in 3 or 4" was quite the experience to read, hah.
I had to live in a home that didn’t have a basement (far too much limestone, you had to blast dynamite to make foundations so despite the frequent storms nobody really bothered unless they had “walk in basements” on hillsides with new construction), and insult to injury, no place to shelter-long hall, every room had a window (even the bathrooms), NO interior rooms, NO closers big enough to stick a family + pets.
Yeah. It gave me cptsd that’s only getting better in that respect after moving someplace that isn’t EVERY Storm Is Severe Thunderstorms (and capable of staightline winds flattening everything or tornados). NOW I have a basement. Because NOW it’s SANDY Soil so it’s easy for folks to have one. And the thunderstorms here are…kinda a joke.
As a child in my homestate that I lived until 3 years ago? It was common enough for the house to sound like it was in a vacuum with an utter ROAR of wind outside, with the pressure feeling like your head needs your ears to pop. Or quite literally have walls of water dumping from the sky, and realizing you lost a tree; the rain was too thick and loud to hear it crash. Or hear a tree closer to the house bending and snapping and make the house shake as it landed parallel to the hall you and your parents tried to shelter in, hoping it will not fall on you
FUCK not having at the very least an interior bathroom with NO WINDOWS to use as a storm shelter. It is my no1 requirement for an apartment-I’ll invest in high quality screws and locks and a cricket bat THANKS
Northern Michigan here, we have only had two watches in my home town. Aka, no tornado ever came, yet we got to see a super cell once. Kinda dope.
One dropped in Gaylord last year. First time I've heard of a tornado in N MI like ever.
also SW Michigan here, and Ive also been in a couple of tornadoes. I remember hard rain, losing power, then several trees falling on the house and car. they're surprisingly very quick. Our deadliest tornado was an F3 that killed 5 people, but I know there was an F5 in Flint in 1953. Cant really say much else ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm from southeast Michigan, or Rochester Hills. I've pretty much never gotten any tornadoes that touch down in my life. I mean, the area where I live is pretty hilly and forested, hence the name. Only just last summer in 2022, a tornado touched down not too far from my city. I think it went past and ended up near Flint, then subsided as usual. Other than that and a couple other bad storms that didn't result in a tornado, I'd say the weather is sort of calm other than some storms occasionally.
This makes me grateful that I've never experienced a tornado my whole life, and I'm not planning to.
I have never experienced one, and after watching all those storm chaser videos by Pecos Hank, I hope to never experience one in the future.
We can’t all be so lucky.
You are everywhere, guess I am too if I’m seeing you again.
@@adryncharn1910 try living in tornado ally. That’s why I have a basement.
I experienced one tornado.... and I was camping in a friend's RV. I was actually wandering around outside wondering what was going on and then the wind started beating the rig around and I figured even though an RV is a tornado magnet, it was still safer than being outside.
I remember being on vacation in the summer of 1974, visiting relatives in Ohio. I was just a teenager but we drove through a town that had been hit badly by tornadoes during the previous April. The town was called Xenia. The tornado was a F-5. Multiple schools and commercial buildings were destroyed. The sight of 150 year old oak trees torn out of the ground was incredible. I believe the damage was so great that the federal government instituted new weather warnings and improved safety warnings in response to the damage caused by the tornadoes that touched down that April day across the Midwest.
My mom and aunts helped clean up after that one. I was born 5 months later in Xenia. Xenia has been hit three times now if I remember right.
Dannnnng your old !I'm kidding ...don't hate on me
That is the story we were told up in the Cleveland area as kids. Still remember all the tornado drills.
I had an ex named Xenia lol
I'll never forget the tornado outbreak in 2011, driving through what looked like giant scratch marks and destroyed homes on my thirty minute highway trip home.
I thought for sure my house and my dogs were gone. They were a little shook up, as was I, but safe and sound.
Thank you for this video. It just so happens, that we had a tornado in Europe last summer. Cause covid was starting to get boring I guess. We rarely have tornados in Czechia and they usually are up to F2 and don't occure in populated areas, do most people don't even know about it. Just imagine the shock, when F4 tornado goes through seven villages destroying everything in its way. It felt unreal. Whole republic got together to aid the effected area, it was truly heartwarming. My family lives nearby, my brother-in-law is a voluntary firefighter and helped to remove debris, consequentially received medal. There is a ton of footage too, cause most people didn't recognize the danger. Who would have thought. One video truly speaks to me, there is a woman talking to her husband while taking the video, she sound like an averige neighbour saying "look, how the trees are bending, wow, it looks just like in America" and stuff. As if she is watching a movie. And then she goes silent for a second as it occures to her, it's indeed a tornado and it's happening right now to her and her family. She just silently says: "I think it's comming our way" and then her husband rushes her to the basement. It's really hard to watch. Six people dies that day, up to 300 were injured and many homes were destroyed. In our small, safe country most people never heard of.
Considering how solid Czech architecture tends to be, the pictures of that particular tornado's aftermath were pretty scary, somewhat reminiscent of older pictures of towns that the Red Army had taken in the later part of WWII.
There is an absolutely amazing video of that tornado. Maybe the beet video of a tornado I’ve ever seen, which is so ironic since no one was expecting it and there are no chasers there while tornado alley sometimes 100+ people at once chasing tornados with cameras permanently recording.
Tornadoes are just utterly random, they skip around like a stone on water and do things to the land that are hard to wrap your mind around.
Prošel jsem tornádem, které se vám loni stalo v ČR. Vracel jsem se ze Srbska. Nic tak hrozného jsem v životě neviděl a to jsem přežil dvě války.
Yep, that was a shocker, absolutely unreal. IIRC, there was a newspaper article stating that the last tornado of this size was recorded in 10th century - a millenium ago! That really drives home how rare this occurence is, and I do hope we have another thousand years to go without one.
Some students of our school are from the affected area, all of their class went to help. The solidarity that people exhibit at such moments is something I am indefinitely grateful for, as it restores my hopes for the humanity.
Kinda disappointed the title is "Why are there no tornadoes in Europe?" when the video is actually "Why are there so many tornadoes in the US?" There's very little talk of Europe.
Because it's not just europe, it's the entire world except the United States
I imagine it has to do with higher atmospheric pressure, lower humidity and weaker wind shear.
If one wants a story about Europe to the detriment of the entire world, simply open 99.99% of history books
Jup. The title is misleading. Should've been "Why is there so many tornadoes in the US versus the rest of the world?" Mentioning Europe in the title gives you the expectation that the video teaches you why there's no tornadoes in Europe. Which is also incorrect btw, cuz there are tornadoes in Europe, just not such big ones as the US. But either way people who click on a video about Europe are probably not interested in 95% info about a total different area 🤷.
@@mrcrackdonald_1 its actually 2 things for the US: Gulf of Mexico and Corn. And yes, that second one is true, its why the Northern states get tornados. Its wild how much moisture corn puts into the atmosphere.
As a storm chaser AND a Joe Scott fan, this was the best upload in a long time. Love seeing the shoutouts to Hank, too! Great guy
Neat! I'm going to explore your channel now, I will likely subscribe too!
"If you're in a mobile home, go literally anywhere else." Yes! My family and I have joked for decades that mobile homes have a target on the roof that only tornadoes can see.
I remember the 87 tornado in Edmonton. It was the single most terrifying thing I've encountered thus far in my life. Baseball size hail and twisted trees 3' in diameter like they were spaghetti noodles. It was close to a mile wide if I'm not mistaken.
I was like 3 when it happened. Grandpa was working at Canada Packers that day. Safety guy. I think he probably saved a few lives. As he told it a lot of the workforce was standing in the parking lot gawking as it rolled in. Bullhorn “GTF inside lmao”. Lost to time now, so is he. Hopefully we don’t have another any time soon.
7:05 This is absolutely true. I grew up and currently live in Birmingham Alabama and as a kid, we would maybe have a tornado every one or two years, but recently we’ve been getting multiple strong tornados a year, sometimes multiple in a month.
Living in Switzerland (but anyone I know in other European countries says pretty much the same thing), tornados have always been this fantastical, far-off and exotic natural disaster that I heard off in stories like the Wizard of Oz, and I knew they existed and were bad, but never really thought about how they impacted real people.
I was only in my late teens when it slowly dawned on me how incredibly real of a threat they are when I saw certain pictures of tornados in the US and learned about not just the scale of the destruction, but also how frequently you guys have to deal with them. To think that for many people in the US, tornado drills are something completely normal is wild to me.
In Europe, we're also mostly spared from Earthquakes, and those that do happen often don't really affect us. Not only because they're far weaker in general so we often don't even notice them, but whenever a slightly stronger one does happen, many of our houses are so solidly built that we can just shrug it off.
In most of Europe, floods and, in southern Europe, droughts, are by far the most destructive natural disaster, and in Switzerland specifically, small earthquakes can cause avalanches - and those are a very real threat that can bury a village in a terrifying instant. Our houses thus need to be built to last, so they don't just get swept away. If your house gets buried in an avalanche with you in it, you have a pretty good chance of making it out alive because the rescuers have alot of time to dig you out of there, and with any luck, you have enough air to last you several days. If our walls were made of plywood like in the US (no disrespect lol), you'd be crushed flat by the rubble before you knew what hit you.
Avalanches are not something that I've personally witnessed (except in the news), but flooding is rather common, and I remember the Great Alpine Flood of '05 like it was yesterday. I was only 6 then, but I remember how all of us kids helped stack the sandbags by our school and other buildings, how the firemen rowed their boats through the streets that were filled knee to head high, depending on where you were, the ducks swimming next to them to keep them company, and how we played pirates on the benches next to the lake, the bench being our pirate ship, completely surrounded by water. More importantly, I remember many of the people I know who lost almost everything they owned in this disaster, and how we spent the rest of the year cleaning up the destruction and pumping the water out of the first floors and cellars.
Thankfully, at least in Switzerland, only 6 people actually died, but in surrounding countries that were also hit, many were less lucky. It's quite a surreal memory to me, because I viewed much of it through the lens of a child - plus, my family's house was along a hill so we were personally spared from the worst.
In comparison to yearly strong tornadoes, this might not seem like that much of a big deal, but I believe it was thanks to our solid infrastructure that even most of those whose homes were hit the worst were able to rebuild and repair them eventually instead of being compmetely displaced. Without those solid foundations, things would have been much, much worse and many more people would have died.
Tapping "read more" on this comment is a bit of a commitment.
Please learn paragraph breaks
@@UA-camSupportSucks fixed it for you :)
Fun fact, lighter and more flexible construction is more likely to survive an earthquake. Any concrete or masonry must be reinforced (rebar) to be deemed safe and pass code in California. Even in a 6.5 magnitude quake when I was a kid, almost all of our wood frame construction houses were perfectly fine despite roads and sidewalks being broken up and cracked apart and older concrete buildings being completely leveled. The only houses that weren't okay were shifted on their foundation or had damaged foundations. Also, you want to avoid post and beam construction for houses in earthquake areas as it's heavier and harder to reinforce for the kinds of stresses put on the joints between beams. It's all about prioritizing the right construction method for the environment.
Unfortunately we have horrific floods, droughts, earthquakes and avalanches in North America too. I'm unfortunately live in a place by the Rockies that has floods and avalanches plus destructive blizzards, snow squalls and tornadoes. In fact we had a horrific flood 9 years ago that killed many people and destroyed thousands of homes and buildings (and an even more destructive last year, just one province over from me). I guess at least I'm lucky that where I live, at least, we're too far up to get Hurricanes here, and earthquakes are rare.
The point is, weather is just more extreme in North America than most places in Europe; which sucks, but I would never live anywhere else. You take the bad with the good! :)
I am from Bangladesh and I've read about that tornado when I was in High School but I never expected it to be the deadliest Tornado ever recorded thanks for the info
I grew up with tornadoes my entire life. Once we were in the basement of my grandparents' farm house and their feral barn cat (who ran at the sight of people) passed her kittens to my grandpa through the tiny basement window. The tornado pulled up into just a funnel cloud when it went over the house, but I remember looking out of the window up into some swirling, terrifying, dark clouds before being snatched away by my dad and covered up.
The second one happened the day after Joplin was destroyed, they were south of us. I was working at a preschool when we had to get classrooms full of children into bathrooms etc... I was at the front desk when a mother pulled in to pick up her children. I ran to the foyer to open the doors so she wouldn't have to key in her code because a funnel cloud was over the building across the street and heading toward us. She was clueless and didn't understand my gesture to hurry up. How can you be that f*&#ing ignorant about tornadoes when you live in KANSAS?! The siren was going off LITERALLY on the property. (it's fun for the infant room teachers when that goes off every month for testing)
The third one happened to my Aunt and Uncle. Their neighborhood was actually hit by a tornado. We happened to be visiting grandparents shortly after and drove over to see the damage. It was some of the weirdest shit I have ever seen. Since it was in the boondocks of their state, they had a television antenna. It was wrapped around a small balcony on the second floor off of the main bedroom. The blown glass hummingbird feeder hanging from it didn't have a crack or chip. We saw someone's boxing ring tangled up in the top of a tree. Another family's breakfast nook table and two chairs were lifted out of the house and dropped perfectly in a stream like some wildlife creatures were going to have their morning coffee there.
Did the barn cat survive?
Also what happened in your uncle and aunt’s area was fascinating and cracking me up
I don't believe it
I can believe the last part though
@@GlowBerryPumpkin I can believe it all. Lifelong experience with tornadoes and runs to the basement (when there was enough of a warning). Animals can behave VERY differently in the face of a natural disaster, and the mothering instinct in cats can overcome any fear. I've heard stranger stories.
When he mentioned an EF-5 tornado outside of the US, I thought Joe was going to talk about the one we had in the next town over in Elie, Manitoba, Canada but luckily no injuries were reported
That’s what I was thinking of too. I’m next door in Saskatchewan and we get tornadoes too as well as in Alberta. The Edmonton tornado in 1987 was a very destructive one. I’ve personally seen two tornadoes here in Saskatchewan.
It makes sense that we get them here. We are just a continuation of the US Great Plains. It’s hot and dry, and when a cool, humid air mass rolls through, you are getting a hell of a thunderstorm, and a chance for a twister.
We had a big tornado rip through a small town close to where I live just a couple months ago. It was very strange how selective the damage can be. Driving through the town, we had seen a house absolutely destroyed with the trees ripped in half. But the house next door just 75 feet over looked like nothing happened. Crazy stuff
Right?! It's insane how it can TOTALLY DESTROY one side on the street.. but then somehow the other side is [comparatively] pristine! Wonder how that happens... is it the inherent randomness of fluid dynamics, or something else entirely? I'm sure somebody knows!
@@idontwantahandlethough I’d assume randomness of fluids but I can’t be sure I’m not a weatherman
That could be due to the size of the tornado. If it's small enough you can see that damage be localized to only the path the tornado follows. It's easier to see it with a big one like came through just north of Atlanta back in the late 90s. It left a clear path of destruction where you could see buildings and trees flattened as though someone had come through with a huge bulldozer knocking a path a hundred feet wide or for what seemed like miles. While everything to either side was relatively undamaged (just some things knocked over.)
I can already tell Plead is talking about Dec 10-11. That thing ripped concrete slabs out of foundations and shattered said concrete. Still waiting on the deserved EF5 rating....
@@TweezersUnlimited Yes! Dec 10th New melle/Defiance MO. Stated as EF3
As someone who lives in Kansas, when we hear that there is a tornado around, we immediately go outside and try to find it. Also I didn't notice until you mentioned it but tornados here have been getting more uncommon.
In my lifetime Greensburg is the only big one that’s happened here in the state, that entire town pretty much was leveled, it was hard to look at the news. I’ve never understood the appeal of going outside to watch when the sirens go off but that stereotype is 100% real
I grew up peacefully in a little town in East Texas until 2015, when we got our own Big One.
The town hadn’t been hit by one since WWII and I never thought we’d be seriously hit by one as the area was on an elevated plateau, so Tornadoes have to climb up to get to us. Well an F-IV decided to come say high. It crossed over I-20 and blew a hole through our town, destroying 30% of all buildings, killing two people (and elderly couple, their dog stayed with them and survived). I lived a couple miles east of the town, and remember dead silence, no wind, and a black wall of cloud so high you couldn’t see the top, just stretched into oblivion. At about 8:50 a powerful wind hit us, howling away. My dad yelled to get inside and we sat in the bathroom for 3 hours, waiting. The next morning I saw three helicopters flying over the town, and we lost cell service and power for 3 days. My mum was in the UK at the time and saw it on BBC News, freaked her out for sure.
School got blown away, as well as an entire neighborhood flattened, and was never rebuilt. Lots of support from neighboring towns for years after, a new school was built. Go strong Van, Tx.
I remember that one and seeing some of the aftermath. I was visiting my hometown of Sulphur Springs during the 2015 day after Christmas outbreak. It was one tornado after another heading towards us. They all veered off but it was a pretty nerve-wracking afternoon.
I live less than 30 miles from Van. There has definitely been an increase van zandt cou nty.
In the early 80's, a tornado came within 1/4 mile of our house in Missouri, then demolished a large trailer park by the river. My school bus route normally picked up kids from that trailer park - except for the morning after the tornado. It picked up the two of us on our hill then just continued on to school after that, when normally it was packed - very surreal for an elementary school kid.
One thing very few people mention is just how long it takes to clean up/rebuild afterwards. Trailers were picked up and tossed in that storm, reduced to matchsticks or piles of rubble. For months afterward, my school bus drove through that carnage, picking up the few kids from the luckier trailers that were damaged but not destroyed.
I hid from the tornado sirens under my father's sturdy old desk that night - same desk that I'm tying this on. Still remember the unsettling feeling riding that half-empty school bus, looking out at the remains of people's homes.
So my "tornado story" was when I was in high school. I think I was in 11th grade. A storm came through, the power went out, everyone was in the inner hallway of our double-wide mobile home. I was looking out the front door (northwest facing) to see what I could see. The lightning was like a strobe light, the wind was loud, and all of a sudden two 15' tall juniper trees a little bit uphill from our house layed over sideways away from each other and the tiny saplings were being pulled out of the ground as I watched stunned. I realized I needed to hide, so I ran inside the wrong direction, turned around and ran towards the hallway where everyone else was and I tripped over a bed frame in the middle of the living room and got punctured by those super long furniture staples (destroyed the furniture, btw). The tornado bounced over our house, but the damage to the houses around us was weird.
The single-wide uphill from us had a truck with a boat on its trailer under a car port... the boat detached from the back of the trailer and was upside down on top of the car port. We had a weird basketball backboard that was an entire sheet of plywood mounted to a telephone pole cut in half so there were two poles buried about 3 feet in the ground. It was pulled straight up and laid over. The holes didn't have any twisting damage, they were just empty holes. Some of our shingles were damaged, and we had to have a tarp over that part of the roof for a bit.
As an Aussie that lived in Dallas for five years with my family I remember the community concern that went with the tornado sirens. It seemed surreal, until one day we had a touchdown (and that the NFL type) in our town of Frisco. That same day there was a series of touchdowns all the way to Fort Worth were it took out quite a few windows in the downtown area. My oldest daughter then only about 9 or 10 was traumatised by the experience enough so that when we returned to Australia if my daughter heard a siren she would be on the verge of tears. BTW in Australia there we have a word for them that originates in one of the aboriginal languages. We call them a "Willy Willy." But you are correct it is very rare that a tornado here is remotely like one that is the norm in tornado alley.
Armidale nsw October 14th last year !
Plus we had a smaller one west of Armidale about a month ago. Touched down for about 5km long and about 500m wide path of destruction.
I had heard about dust devils and willy willies in Australia before but growing up in school you always thought that they were something that happened in the outback. Then I think two years ago was the first time I ever heard of a tornado ever hitting an Aussie town, then we had another one last year. Coupled with the sudden earthquake that hit us down here in Melbourne I swear we're running out of luck when it comes to the weather, we use to have it so good, aside from the heat, rain and occasional cyclone
Sydney often gets "hook ecchos" on radar, but they are always rain wrapped and reported as "damaging winds."
Australian meteorologists didn't pay any attention until a visiting US weather expert saw the tornadic signature on the radar while visiting.
Going back through the recordings in the 80s and 90s (when this occurred) there were dozens of hook echos.
Located between the Blue Mountains and the Pacific, Sydney is possibly a mini Tornado Alley.
It may become a thing, there are the blue mountains then the land to the west which somewhat mirrors the geography of the states, at the moment I assume the southern ocean is too cold to generate things but time will tell?
While not very common, there are some areas in Germany do get relatively frequent tornadoes, for European standards that is. I lived in Nettetal , which is in an area that would see a tornado capable of doing actual damage about once a year. And every few years one of those would flatten a few farms and kill a few people. Thankfully, so far none ever hit any city or village in that area.
As a German, I have never heard of this! I knew every now and then water spouts would exist but I didn't know we have tornadoes on land. Crazy
@@TheCangar m.ua-cam.com/video/6wUnuXpZ2ww/v-deo.html This is one that happened in 2018 pretty close to where I lived. That was an F2. Thankfully it did not really hit anything and only took a few roof with it and injured few people.
@@theexchipmunk oh wow thanks! "it's coming directly towards us!" "on no the car!" lol most German thought ever :D the commenter is great!
@@TheCangar Duisburg 2004. Ripped right through the city center and I was in the middle of it. Took maybe half an hour and afterwards the city looked like a war zone. All the trees were uprooted, cars smashed and many roofs were gone. Fortunately nobody got severely hurt. Good thing our houses weren’t made of cardboard.
@@manlymcmanface9932 Cardboard?!... No man... here in North America we built with OSB and other engineered wood products 😌 designed to leave voids for survivors when the Earth shrugs or gawd vacuums... only good ol' American quality here...
I went outside to check the weather since there were no sirens alerting us. It was raining green leaves, and I saw a large piece of corrugated steel spinning 50 feet in the air. I stood in awe for a moment, but then I quickly ran inside to warn everyone to take cover. Unfortunately, many people lost their lives that day.
"Sailors to your mom" - LOL So perfect!
🤣🤣🤣
I love this guy hahahaha
My dad is former Navy... this psychic son of a
@@andrewbecerra550 I'm former Navy, as is my wife...we both died laughing at this line. 🤣
As a retired sailor I approve of this message.
I grew up and still live in Germany, and my parents always told me tornadoes don't happen in Germany Everytime I saw a tornado documentary as a kid.
I told them they could always happen but they wouldn't be strong and they didn't believe me.
Last year we had two tornadoes in Germany that made it to the news and even though they are nothing compared to the ones in America, I was right! Now they listen to me with the probabilities of things.
Thankfully we weren't hit and we donated to the people whose houses were destroyed.
Keep safe everyone!
Look up "London tornado of 1091".
Germany had an F5 in the 1700's.
"The sky can eat your house" Dude, best, line, ever.
Almost: " Like sailors to your mom" surpasses it.
We get em here in Ontario as well, mostly little ones but its enough of a risk that we had tornado drills growing up. I had a weird obsession with tornadoes as a kid, i think i watched wizard of oz too young and figured "welp guess i have to be prepared to save my family from a tornado"
I was working near Ear Falls, ON in 2009 when that F2 killed three men from Oklahoma staying at a fishing camp. The sky that night was insane and still hard to believe.
We have tornadoes quite often in Saskatchewan as well as in Alberta and Manitoba. Really, we are just a continuation of the US Great Plains.
Well if you continue the US-Canada border out west in a straight line east, basically 90% of Ontario's population is south of there. So makes sense (I live in Metro Detroit)
I grew up in Georgia, and I remember one time when my dad and I were going fishing and I wanted to ride in the back of the truck bc it was so hot out, like 94 degree deep south summer day. It started to hail, which is a consequence of the super hot moist air rising high up into the clouds and freezing, creating a vortex. When it does that, you figure out where you need to be, because most of the time it means there will be a tornado.
My mom always told me a story of a tornado that seemed to break up like 50 yards from our home. She grabbed my brother and I and she threw us in a bath tub and put a crib mattress on top of us. Luckily it disappeared before hitting my house, but I remember seeing the gap in the pecan orchard across from my house when I was growing up.
was this around ringgold?
@Citizen No.0 Ringgold gets a lot of tornadoes doesn't it? I live like 20 mins south on I-75 and I'm glad we haven't had any tornadoes in a while
@@citizenno.0332 no, like 5 hours south in Albany
@@YeetLord666 oh ok, i was just curious. my grandparents live in ringgold and they had a tornado a few years back and i can still see its path on the side of the hills
@@coldmexican288 not that i know of i know they had a bad one bout ten years ago
Pekos Hank is a musician, a scientist, an animal lover and above all a gentleman. I cannot wait for you to interview him.
Thanks for the upload.
Only the mention of this wonderful man made my day better
Interviewing is a skill. Leave it to channels that have a talent for that.
@@bzuidgeest I know that it's your opinion and it's OK to say it... But, oh for the gods, what a bad opinion.
@@Kanitoxx yes it's my opinion and I still like the videos on the channel. But if you have ever seen the best interviewers work then you must understand that Joe and the one from RMC channel and many others are just not in the same league...
But if they want to try, that's fine by me. Keeps them from getting bored with the main content 😀
@@bzuidgeest yeah, interviewing is a skill, but no one is born with it fully developed, you have to hone it with practice. And what better practice than interviewing people? Your first complete denial is what made your opinion a bad opinion... I want Joe to interview all kinds of people. Even if he's not that good at it
Omg Pecos Hank is awesome! His "Tornadoes of (year)" videos are always solid gold and absolutely worth checking out!
My wife and I were huddled under our stairs during one of the few tornadoes to come through Chicago. She was 7 months pregnant. Our son has always been terrified of tornadoes even though we've never talked about them and he's never experienced even a watch. He'd ask every night before bed if there'd be a tornado. We had him in therapy for it from age of 7 to 10.
My first tornado I remember being in was when I was about 6-7. I was born in Kansas City, MO and I lived in an apartment complex. I remember being terrified of the winds and my big sister held me while I was likely screaming and crying when all of a sudden, a huge boulder the size of about a beach ball came crashing through the window. My main memory from that day was just being in shock of how a big rock that size could have been lifted by nothing but wind and hurled through the window. No surprise to me now, but at the time it was crazy to me to see it move entire cars and tear down trees, etc. I know that it had come from about 50 yards away cause it was this big painted rock that lined the driveway entrance to the development. I have been back to visit since and have pictures. That's how I know the approx. distance because this happened in the 80 's and I was really young. It's a force like no other I have ever seen and I moved to the east coast where I grew up and have seen my fair share of hurricanes since and even got trapped in one about 25 years ago, but they don't even scare me the way tornados do.
I also when I was visiting family there in the summer of '94 (Gladstone, MO actually just on the outskirts of KC). I was a teenager and I took my brother's bike out for a ride, when I noticed the sky got dark, the wind got completely calm for a moment, and the next thing I knew I was getting pelted with hail larger than golf balls, they were so destructive they were busting people's windshields on their cars and leaving huge dents in them as well. It was followed with tornados too, but I hauled a** back to my brother's house.
I have never seen a twister with my own eyes and don't really want to. but I've seen quite a bit of footage of storm chasers and amateurs and these things devastate entire towns. Screw that. I feel bad for all those people that have lost everything being in their direct path, with nowhere to hide.
It's the randomness that's so bad. You can track a hurricane pretty accurately now, but twisters still pop up like jack-in-the-boxes out of basically nowhere and then skitter across the land with no rhyme or reason...
I wonder if that's the same tornado storm from my story in KC - also in the 80's lol :D
Weather nerd here. Very great and informative video. However, the part with europe has some flaws ( as well as middle east). The first flaws are with the reports. Europe averages 700 tornado reports each year, based on ESWD Data. Two highest was 2021 with 975 reports & 2017 with 915 reports. Although most of them are tornadoes over water, it's still counted in the frequency and total reports. Another flaw was the UK part. In 2014, ESSL released a climatology of tornado reports in europe, reported to ESWD. In that climatology, germany has the most tornadoes per area, with 50 - 100 tornadoes per 10.000km2, expanding across the west side of germany into belgium and netherlands. Another 50 - 100 tornadoes per 10.000 km2 area was noticed in the german/czech republic border and another in south-west. The UK had 20 - 50 per 10.000 km2 at highest. That's equal to denmark, poland, france and many more. The average with 20 - 50 can be argued. Although it's the estimate, a more likely number is 15 - 20, as that's the typical amount reported in a year to ESWD from the UK. Most of the tornadoes are weak, but in reality, most are across the world (incl us). For example, if you compare the 15 - 20 a year in the UK to certain states, the frequency in terms of weak and strong tornadoes close to be the same. Europe have its own alley as well. Another flaw was related to middle-east. Although it is true to some extent, turkey should be excluded there. ESWD has recieved a total of 645 tornado reports from turkey, as of today, march 8. In january, 2019, a cyclic supercell produced 11 tornadoes in the antalya area, claiming the lives of a few. Highest rated being rated F2. ESWD also counts report in certain nations in eurasia, here under the surrounding areas in the med area. Cyprus has seen 141 reports.
bonus facts:
regarding the russia part at 8:55. That area that see the most tornadoes in russia is of course the european part of russia
The part where you never heard about massive tornadoes outside the US can be explained. Most don't know what i call "the hidden tornadoes", as a reference to the fact that they're not heard about often. Palluel, france F5 tornado in the 1960s is a good example. The Holstebro, denmark high-end F3 tornado of 1962 or the Fårvang, denmark high-end F3 tornado of 1963 can also be used as an example. They're put in their own language for tornadoes, making it quite un-noticable for people to read. Denmark it's skypumpe, sweden it's tromb, germany it's windhose. , netherlands it's windhoos, poland it's trąba powietrzna. They're the same thing.
Legend. Thanks. I've been to the Antalya area. I thought they couldn't have any because of the mountains. You learn more every day!
Man, I wanted to look smart and link a Wikipedia article on Wirbelstürme in Deutschland, and then there is already a scientist explaining everything better than I could ever imagine.
Where do I go now to try to appear smart?
@@dominikklein602 School
Pretty sure you are why Joes eye twitches. But good info.
Excellent. Very well summarized and explain, thank you!
7:53 "...but, they're very small."
So back when I was in late secondary school in England, myself and my friends were out on the playing field and for a few seconds I have my back turned to them as I pick up a ball. I then hear, 'Look, that's a tornado!' and when I turn, there's nothing. My friends all insisted that one had formed only a hundred feet away before dissipating again.
So yes, they're not just small: you can almost literally blink and miss them.
I saw one once. It moved a few crisp packets and made someone lose the page in the magazine they were reading.
I live in MS, tornado alley. Our weather is very unpredictable. For example, the low was 9 degrees, the high was 70 😯.
Tornadoes are terrifying, we live in tornado alley. I’ll never forget one that hit the neighbors house, but went over our house. I will never forget the sound. It’s truly like a train, times 1 million. It last for only a second, but something you don’t forget.
My husband is Russian, his family is still in the mother land. When the in-laws come visit, they don’t understand what an actual tornado is. It’s so unknown to them that when a siren goes off, I have to explain that getting in the car, to go to tj maxx, is not a good idea.
Not only was I a block from the bowling green tornado in December (saw it from my back door) but my dad was a sailor. I feel targeted 😂
The sailor part cracked me up 😆
So you experienced a tornado from a distance that not what joe asked.
@@illig4912 well, a block away is a lot closer than I would want to be to a tornado lol
@@superbeast8373 I believe it, There are huge parts of town that still look like it hit yesterday. Hope all of your people were okay.
@@superbeast8373 My apartment was hit by your mom stumbling from the parking lot. The damage was so great they had to rule out the possibility of a tornado.
I was so hyped about him talking to Pecos Hank. I love his UA-cam channel. My tornado story was an F2. We weren't hit very hard, but surrounding neighborhoods weren't so lucky.
I've never understood Midwest thought patterns on that as well, I grew up in Southern California, and my wife is from the Midwest,.so when I first met her family send people from that area, they're like " How does it feel to be safe from all those earthquakes?"
My wife was super afraid till she felt her first quake and she barely noticed it, she thought it was a big truck going by our house
Growing up, we moved throughout the Midwest, so I had experienced a lot of bad storms, but my first Earthquake happened a few months after my dad's job moved us to Taiwan in 1999. My 1st quake was a 7.6 magnitude! I couldn't believe how long it lasted, the ground felt like jello, being stuck alone on the 4th floor of our townhouse in the middle of the night. Left huge cracks in the wall & caused a lot of damage all over the country. I didn't sleep for days, because every time I tried, there was an aftershock. Was a bad introduction to quakes!
Midwesterner here. I think quakes and tornadoes are equally frightening. When I lived in FL for a couple of years, they regale you with hurricane stories. I wasn't impressed. They forecast those suckers days in advance.
I think in either direction the problem is only the big ones tend to make the news and have movies made about them. The vast majority are small and only cause minor, if any, damage.
The most ground shake I've ever felt was caused by a cargo train driving by at speeds just a couple feets away (about 10ft away), while walking with a group.
As someone whose lived in both areas I would say it probably comes down to area of effect, I lived mid west for 20 years and was never impacted by a tornado even though they have hit the towns i lived in, but an earthquake will affect the entire area, so at that point its a gamble of whether it'll be a big one or not, either way it'll hit you, the tornado not likley only possible
The first time I was actually in a tornado was in the desert of southern New Mexico, at an Air Force base we were living on, 1972. Someone pulled the fire alarm while we were in the base theater, and when the exit door was opened we heard the classic roar of a thousand freight trains. Kids started screaming, and a couple of my friends ran to the parking lot and hid next to a car.
It touched down in the parade grounds in front of the theater. Pulling that fire alarm was a foolish move; we would have been safer inside, and possibly have been primly unaware.
This past spring, I was in my house looking out my back window when I saw the shingles from my roof flying into the yard and getting stuck in trees and the chain link fence. It was an F1 tornado that briefly touched down at several points near the DFW Airport. Quite capriciously, it would damage one or two houses at a time.
I’m from Birmingham, Alabama and tornadoes are definitely going up. Our tornado stories are from April 25th-28th of 2011. We had 15 E4 and E5 tornadoes and 250+ tornadoes just on the 27th. I remember hearing the news on my dad’s hand held radio (we didn’t have power). It sounded like a war zone. Neighbors were pulling people out of ruble with missing limbs. They had to bring in cadaver dogs at one point to try and find all the missing people.
*"Microburst"* .. that's what they called it when half the homes in my area, Lexington, KY, in the 80's were damaged with so much insulation blown everywhere that it looked like a pink snowstorm. No one lost their life, thank God. I remember the police cordoned off the area and I had to prove with my driver's license I lived there. It was surreal.
A microburst is a real thing and is different from a tornado. I work at the Atlanta airport and the other week we had a microburst here that grounded all flights for a couple hours. They typically don't cause any damage to anything on the ground but are deadly to aircraft.
Got caught outside in a couple of microbursts, literally went from 60 MPH to 0 in seconds, with the chassis pushed against the rubber stops. Felt like the hand of an angry god pushing the vehicle down. One was a station wagon, the other a full size Ford service van. The latter requiring my unthreading a tree from the grille and driveshaft.
Basically, it's a cloud falling on you, bringing the air with it.
Had a tornado chase me out of Huntsville, AL back in the early '80's, one trying to form over my head at Ft Indiantown Gap (strong winds blowing through the gap in the three mountains disrupted it, after it drifted north past the three mountains, it touched down and wiped out a farm) and some touching down in our parish, one touching down after we left a town in Texas.
Frankly, I think our ancestors fouled up when they stepped off of the battlestar... ;)
Not tornado related, but I dated someone that had a private plane crash in their yard while they were at work. She definitely had to show ID and other proofs of residence to get home. I think they ultimately didn’t allow her home for a couple of days cause plane parts in her driveway or something
Tornadoes are the reason why I even know what Insulation was, when I was a kid at the end of the 90's we literally saw that shit all over the place after the may 3rd tornado that wrecked moore OK.
@@KaiserMattTygore927 I learned what insulation was in the '70's, during the energy crisis, when I helped Dad install it throughout the house.
Around 2013, we had an energy audit of the house and despite a cracked window, they found no improvement in insulation was possible.
I'm from Venice (Italy) and in 1970 we had a freak tornado that hit the lagoon at peak force and literally lifted and threw a waterbus full of people, killing 21 on the spot. Unremarkable if not for the setting I guess but you know... Tornadoes in Europe, we do have them.
In Poland there have been like 5-6 big tornado outbreaks in the last 20 years. The biggest one I can think of was last year in February in Kraków during a week of massive storms in Poland.
It ripped apart several buildings, torn roofs of a couple dozen and even killed a some people. Another major one was in 2017 in Bory Tucholskie.
It carved a half mile wide corridor through a forest and landed straight on a camp ground, killing two girls, trapping several children in debris and wounding 29 people overall.
There was also a tornado outbreak in southern Poland in 2008 with multiple F3 tornadoes that killed 4 people and injured over 50.
Overall tornadoes aren't that common here, but storms are. We've been getting some pretty hectic storms in the last 10 years like the one in 2017 that caused the tornado in Bory Tucholskie.
It went through the whole country with 75-90 mph wind and massive rainfall that caused floods, and overall it caused some 14 million USD in property damage...
We've been getting hurricane level winds pretty much yearly these past decade, we've been getting heatwaves, droughts, floods, and tornadoes have been popping up more.
Growing up in eastern Kansas in the 60's we had weekly storm systems during spring and fall which were usually severe but over time this changed and now we hardly see severe weather and the weather patterns have shifted to Missouri (we are 30 miles from there).
I lived in Atchison in the late 60s-early 70s. I don't remember too many tornado warnings. However, when I lived in Topeka in the early 70s I remember tornado warnings every week.
The only time I experienced something like a tornado was when I was living in Germany in 1995. A thunderstorm pulled through the area, which was nothing unusual in June. We had a friend over for tea and recommended them to have an extra cuppa while waiting for the storm to pass. She decided to do so and as we made an extra pot of tea the typical thunderstorm gusts became a monotonous road. Walking into the living room of our 2nd story apartment on the edge of a forested area, the view from the windows was gone and replaced with a fierce horizontal hailstorm. It lasted some 2 or 3 minutes and then it quitted down as quickly as it had come. After finishing our tea and cake I decided to have a look outside to see whether there was any damage. There wasn't any to our home, nor our neighbouring homes, but some 100 meters beyond our home a deep cut was visible into the forest where a whole line of trees had been shredded over a length of some additional 100m.
When I was 3, and I actually remember this day, my mom was picking me up from daycare in Little Rock Arkansas, a tornado touchdown across the street and almost took out the daycare. There was a basement that all the kids and parents hid in and I remember leaving and see all the trees and street lights thrown everywhere. 3 years later I was living in Paris Tx and a tornado hit outside of town which was on my bus route. See that again reminded me off how little we were in control of nature.
Damn Joe, you were on fire with the wit in this one! Back when I lived in the Florida Keys we would pop outside if the winds were low enough (I mean flying debris is less of a worry when you can stand in the road and see two oceans). Of course living on an island, we could see plenty of waterspouts, sometimes several at a time...sometimes in a circle around us. (Like I said, 2 oceans.) Still wasn't a bad place to live as a kid.
He absolutely was! Except for the waterspout part lol
I totally read ‘poop outside’ which had a whole different visual to your paragraph 😂
Huh, apparently Canada ranks second to the US in tornadoes per year, which really isn't surprising since we are all the North American landmass. We even had one EF5 in Manitoba, but the majority are EF0 to EF2. There was a tornado in Vancouver last year and one here in my hometown of Victoria in 2020. The Vancouver one was caught it on video. Both were EF0 but still enough to do some property damage. But funny story, when I was 5, the street i lived on was not paved yet. It wasn't quite a dirt road, it had been oiled and gravelled. It was summer and it was hot and dry and the wind whipped up what we called a dirt devil. That might not be the right name for it but it was a small (4 foot high) swirl that looked more like the tasmanian devil from the cartoon than a tornado. But to my 5 year old self and my friends, we started screaming "Tornado!" and ran for the front steps and held onto the railing so we wouldn't get blow away.
Yes, the Vancouver video is one of the best tornado videos on the internet (at present). Check it out. Look up tornado UBC Vancouver. (sorry can't link it)
Yeah, I live in Ontario. Kinda worried a big one is gonna maul Toronto one of these days and kill like 5000+ people "Day After Tommorow" style
Quit trying to horn in on our tornado superiority. Go honk in Ottawa!
I grew up in Northern Minnesota and my mother's house was destroyed by an EF-3 tornado back in 2012. That storm produced a lot of tornados in North Dakota, Minnesota, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario.
Dirt/dust devils are really neat. Fun to run right through.
No way! Answers With Joe meets Pecos Hank... my two favourite channels! Love your work, both of ya! Cheers!!!
Now I want a road trip series where Joe and Hank go looking for aliens. Or a really good cheeseburger, whatever.
Had a tornado here in northern Germany. Heard of it back then but never thought much of it. Years later I moved to an apartment and then found out that that tornado happened right here. Damaged neighboring buildings and destroyed lots of cars of the Porsche store across the street.
And then there was even a flooding.
I live in Illinois. Last year we had a tornado rip through our town. My property backs on to a main road. The tornado basically went across that road behind my house, and left my neighborhood untouched. The neighborhood on the other side wasn’t so lucky. I ended up with a random tree in my front yard and pieces of a roof or multiple roofs in my back yard. No damage to my house though. Or even to my trees. To this day I have no idea who’s yard that tree came from, but I’m just glad it didn’t land on my roof because that was a big old oak tree. And as my house is an old ranch house built in the 50’s, that tree would’ve gone right through my whole house and destroyed it. So yeah, it landed in my front yard, it did some minor landscape damage and some minor damage to my front step. Nothing some grading didn’t fix, and the plants grew back in fine.
But it was a surreal situation. It happened late at night. It must have been around 10-11 pm when the siren went off and then my phone went off too. My husband was just getting ready for bed, and I yanked him out of the bedroom and dragged him and the dogs in to our mud room. It’s literally the ONLY room in the house that doesn’t have windows. We sat there with our animals and phone chargers. The rain started coming down, then the lightning started. Couldn’t see it, but you could feel the whole house shake with each strike. Then the hail started, and that was louder than the rain. The wind picked up. And then it got eerily quiet and all of a sudden it sounded like a freight train barreling down. I could feel the whole house moving, heard the joists groaning under the strain. The dogs also went very quiet and basically sat on us. Even the cats came and hid with us and the dogs rather than in their hiding places. Then the power went out. Our phones started blaring again. By this point it was basically barreling past our property. The tornado sirens outside were going off, but you couldn’t even hear them at this point anymore over the sound of this runaway freight train coming past. The sirens went off about 4-5 more times on our phones. It was very surreal and scary. At first my husband was a little blasé about it, but now that we’ve gone through our first “big one” (it wasn’t that big but it was plenty big for our European senses lol), he does react more promptly to hearing the siren going off and is more serious about it.
For me, this was my second tornado. First one was when I was on vacation in Texas when I was 18, and I had to hide in some random persons shelter at their house. When I tell you those people DRAGGED me in to their storm cellar when those sirens went off, I’m not even close to kidding. They didn’t know me from Adam, nor I them, and they just went “nope, you’re coming to hide in here! You ain’t dying on our watch Missy!” Still grateful to those people.
So I had a bit more experience with what a tornado can do than my hubby. Safe to say he learned a valuable lesson that day. If I run to the basement and yell “NADER! Get in the basement NOW!” you get your behind in the basement 😂
I've lived in Southern Illinois at the edge of the Shawnee National Forest since 1970 and I've been through my fair share of tornadoes. We also get hit by the remains of hurricanes- Isaac being a not so recent example that downed aa lot of trees on the western edge of the SNF
However, the May 8th Derecho of 2009 was the most destruction I've ever seen- we were fortunate not to have lost our roof, and that utilities were restored in our area in about two weeks.
Also from Illinois! However we are usually spared the nastier tornadoes due to being up north
From the UK here. There’s an area of the sea off the east of England called The Wash, my grandad was a fisherman and he’d tell me the stories of encountering water spouts in that area of the sea. He said it would happen a lot often than you think! 🙂
We have more tornados per square mile in the UK than the USA. Last time I checked the UK was in Europe, lol.
@@matthewyabsley Scrolled down looking for this comment. I was going to post the exact same thing. It's only the size of them that's different.
@@sarkybugger5009 - God's wrath is bigger in America :-p
@@matthewyabsley we mean it when we say everything is bigger in america
@@matthewyabsley tbf theres not a lot of square miles in the UK
I’m from Texas and my grandfather used to tell a story about coming outside after a tornado and finding an intact tire wrapped around the base of a fully grown tree. I’ve personally been through three tornadoes outside, a couple under a bridge and one I was in a ditch when I went over me.
Having spent a good portion of my life in the Midwest, I've had a few encounters. The most memorable was watching these wisps of cloud extending down from the dark grey mass above. They were twirling around as if dancing. I couldn't help myself. I ran across the road into the field to look up into what i assumed would be a vortex. Thankfully, there was no vortex. Yet. The tornado touched down about 2 miles to the east in Gary, In. I was an the phone to my locaĺ 911 dispatch the whole time. I know i sounded like a lunatic trying to describe to him what i was seeing and my girlfriend wouldn't give it up for like a week, saying i scared her so bad for running TOWARDS a tornado. Only a true storm nut would understand...
Love you, bro!
I have slept through every tornado that's come nearby overnight, including one that wrecked everything less than a hundred yards from the mobile home I grew up in. But, BUT, the slightest noise IN my room, like an adolescent opossum, will wake me up.
I live in Oklahoma and work in Moore. Here we're intimately aware of tornadoes. I lost everything to a F3.
I live in Moore as well, Its been close a couple of times. So far I haven't lost anything yet. Last one got within .8 miles pretty dang close. I hope you were able to recover.
Having lived in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas most of my life I have a lot of tornado stories to tell.
Grew up in California, moved to Texas. I've always been more terrified of tornados than earthquakes. Maybe because I've been through several small earthquakes and not any small tornados
Come up here you'll see them all the time it's normal
If you grow up in the midwest, you get the really apathetic people who will mow their lawn while a tornado is VISIBLE in a field a short distance away (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, ALBERTA MAN). Sometimes you can clearly have a warning they are coming and go chill in the basement, and you can go stare in awe at them safely.... it's those fast and unexpected ones you have to watch out for.
The best time was when my wife and I had to scramble to our car during a company softball game. We watched the port-a-potty in front of us just fall down and pop up like a bowing person a dozen times. Totally wild. I wish I had pulled out my phone to record it.
I can’t remember ever having a tornado in the City of New Orleans, until a shortly after Katrina. It imploded all the window glass in my brothers house into the house as it passed, everyone was asleep and woke up to noise and flying window glass. Amazingly no one was hurt. Had to get a garden rake to start removing the broken glass.
I was told you want to leave a couple windows open if a tornado is heading your way so the pressure differential doesn't make windows or sometimes the whole house implodes.
We had a tornado run through Elgin SC in the early 2000's that cut a line through the treetops for over a mile. You can still see where it happened, theres a channel through the woods running along the side of a couple roads where ALL the trees are cut off about 20 - 30 feet up. It also made an old block building vanish... like nothing left but the concrete slab in the whole 2 acre field. It took all the blocks somwhere else.
Watching this honestly made me thankful I live in NY state! The closest I’ve ever come to witnessing a real tornado was driving through some powerful downspouts (the beginning of cyclonic activity for those who may be uninitiated) on my way through Syracuse on my way home to Binghamton a few years back. It was at night, and although I pride myself on my ability to act quickly to be able to counter against the winds until I could safely pull over to collect myself, (there were also huge branches and limbs in the road being thrown everywhere) I have to admit that a brush even that slight with tornadic activity like that was truly terrifying!
Thanks for another great video, Joe!
I've seen dozens of tornadoes personally. For me the "big one" was the Joplin, Missouri tornado of 2011. It was an F5. Nearly a mile wide. 200 mph winds. I also saw one in Kansas on my way to Colorado. It wasn't particularly large though. It was less than a mile away to the south of the highway while I drive west. Lasted for probably 15 minutes.
The entire time I was watching this I was just thinking about the Joplin tornado. I was scared shitless of tornados before that, but the coverage of the aftermath of that on ky3 solidified my fear of them forever.
Probably one of the top 3 most famous tornadoes ever.
Was on 7th street when it hit.
Oh man, even I’ve heard of the Joplin, Missouri tornado and I live in New York and never seen one in my life. I hope to keep it that way.
I was in Arkansas that year, Joplin was something else man.
I love Pecos Hank!! I’ve been a subscriber for a long time, I’m happy to see him here :’)
I’ve actually been “hit” by 3 tornadoes, one (EF-3) of which severely damaged my home. The other two were small but still frightening.
I think that Europe’s saving grace is the Alps and Carpathians. Any air being advected from the Mediterranean into continental Europe experiences isentropic lift when it crosses the mountains and this squeezes most of the moisture from it. The warm moisture of the Gulf and the Mediterranean are necessary for the energy that rises in updrafts to create supercells that are strong enough to generate tornadoes.
Spain, southern France, Italy, and Greece are wide open to that warm, moist Mediterranean air and cold continental air also gets the drying treatment which makes it very inviting for rising parcels of surface air that cause supercells.
Let us also not forget that the waters of the Atlantic Ocean that face western Europe, unlike the eastern seaboard of the USA, are not fed by tropical warmth, which is why you all rarely, if ever, get hurricanes, and that the Mediterranean, Tyrrhenian, Adriatic, Ionian, Aegean, Alboran, Balearic, and Black Seas are not enough warm water moisture, let alone a strong enough source of warm water currents, as well as air, to override the frigid waters of that part of the Atlantic Ocean, as well as the Arctic Ocean, the Bay of Biscay, the Celtic Sea, the English Channel, the Irish Sea, the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Bothnia, the Norwegian Sea, the Barents Sea, the Kara Sea, Skagerrak, Kattegat, the Gulf of Finland, the Gulf of Riga, and a whole bunch of smaller bays, as well as freshwater lakes, rivers, streams, creeks, and a whole bunch of frozen tundra, as well as the winds and temperatures that accompany them as well.
that’s a good explanation tbf However most strong tornadoes happens north of the alps especially in poland, germany, france, belgium & netherlands Even denmark have up to 15 tornado reports a year
@@hvadskalvihedde2512 I’m thinking that tornadoes in Northern Europe are likely a result of strong shear with limited instability. Dixie Alley gets a lot of this type of tornadoes in winter and they often reach EF3 and even EF4 strength. I don’t expect dew points above 60F to occur often in Europe but latitudes above 50N probably have some hellacious 850mb winds.
You might have something there. I've been through a bunch, but where I live at now we have Signal Mountain on one side, and a lot of low hills on the other, and we have had tornados literally swing around Red Bank and hit in Chattanooga. Several. Yay mountains.
I’ve never been hit by one. The closest was 3 miles for me. And I had zero warning of it so I slept right through it. It wasn’t up to an ef3 at that point but still freaky. Just a small change in wind somewhere down the line and that would’ve been on top of me and I would be very dead. A few years before in 2019 there was a 1.5 mile wide tornado that went somewhere around 10 miles nor the of me. I checked on google maps and the only damage I saw was a big chunk of forest taken down because the latest data was a year later. Nobody died in both but they always cry about it and call it a tragedy. If you take storms seriously and don’t convince yourselves the tiny itty bitty mountains that are east of you will stop tornadoes coming from the west you are wrong. Get to shelter during tornado warnings and you’ll be fine.
I just lived through the tornado that hit Mayfield, Ky. The destruction of our downtown is hard to wrap my head around. I've never experienced anything like it. It destroyed a lot of lives, but there are some things that were just really weird. For example, the tornado took my flower pot but left the dirt that was in it sitting in the same exact spot that the pot was in. How random is that?
OK now that's a wacky one.
I remember one in Montana when I was a kid...in the mountains no less which I know is super rare. We were camping and had to ride it out. The next day my dad took us out to look at the damage and I specifically remember seeing just perfect paths/swaths of trees just simply gone or destroyed. I was super young, late 80's? Only thing I remember is we all got into the Bronco (as opposed to our tents) and spent the night in there (mom, dad and 4 kids and I was the oldest at maybe 10?) and the Bronco was rocking like crazy. I was old enough to remember the swath the tornado cut was only a few hundred feet from us. Looking back I bet my dad was scared sh*tless but at the time he was all like "don't worry about it, you'll be fine". lol
He was afraid if Mother Nature got you; then Your Mother would Get Him!
😂
Yeah, tornados are kinda rare here in Montana, but they happen. Problem is, since they are so rare here, most buildings (at least in the western-half) aren't built with the typical fortifications you'd see in places where tornados are far more frequent; storm cellars aren't exactly commonplace by any stretch.
We had an almost tornado that just didn't quite make touchdown over by the next town over. That did everyone a concern.
Mom & Dads just be like that. Back when kids could ride up front, if we stopped suddenly, there would always be an arm out stopping us from falling forward. Instinct to protect and prevent panic.
@@DraptorRonin had a tornado on the coast of Oregon in like 2010, was playing in soccer game while The tornado Ripped the roof of a local Izzy’s lol
@@DraptorRonin it seems odd to hear you talking about tornado areas having fortified houses. From an international perspective they look like they are built of kindling. Normal houses are brick here, houses in cyclone prone areas are full steel frame with bars tying the whole thing into the foundations and multiple reinforcements.
As someone from the UK, I think we often take our characteristically "miserable" and "boring" weather for granted. Sure, whilst it may not be the best at times, at least we don't have massive hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc. It's a good thing that the worst we get over here is the heatwaves, occasional late / early-year storms, as well as flash flooding because, honestly, it could be a whole lot worse, and I'm terrified for what the weather could become if climate change continues
We had two tornados go through Springfield, Illinois on the same route two weeks apart in March of 2006. The first of these did considerable, but not catastrophic damage to some areas of our town. It was unusual in that it was massive, nearly a mile wide, but the winds were relatively slow, just an F1 or lower in most places, although in some areas it got up to F2 or F3 briefly, and there were a couple homes and businesses that were essentially leveled. The thing I noticed was the extremely rapid drop in air pressure as the tornado went over us. Our ears popped hard during the seconds when the tornado passed over our home. And also, it was very loud.
The big one here was Black Friday, July 31, 1987. F4 tornado ripped through Eastern Edmonton, destroyed a good quarter of industrial property, ripped through a trailer park. Killed 27 people. The story I always remember is a steel foremen being sent out to the yard to inspect something just before the storm hit... No one ever saw him again, or his remains
Yup, I was in Sherwood Park at the time. It was coming right at us before it died out. Can recall watching the bushes in our backyard getting torn from the ground and my mother said “basement now!”.
My mom still talks about this I wasn't born yet but my older sisters were. I think they were living in the Kensington area at the time.
I was 11 when the 1965 "Palm Sunday" tornado outbreak happened. I lived in Michigan, and we were just on the edge but I still have a fear of wind blowing at night...55 confirmed tornadoes, 450 miles long path, 266 deaths. I remember we went out driving around the next day to see what it had done, and seeing some things that are still clear in my memory; an aluminum fishing boat wrapped around a tree like a bow tie. Long lines of 50' tall oak trees laid down in neat rows. Another tornado left someones roof gable floating in the lake by our dock. I will still move back to my home state this summer, but you have to be realistic and prepared.
Once while listening to a BBC radio broadcast when I lived in Central Europe, the speaker was going on about how he thought that the weather in England was the most exciting in the world.
As an American from the Midwest, my reaction was, 'hold my beer.'
Last tornado I heard of in my relatively small Dutch city of Utrecht was 350 years ago and it's still a big part of what shaped the central architecture of the city.
That's how often we get 'em
I've been through a few, having lived in various parts of Tornado Alley for most of my life. Nothing traumatic as yet from them, though. Walked home once when they closed work over it and I didn't drive at the time. Half a mile with multiple tornadoes headed in my direction, but I was more concerned with getting back to my apartment so my puppy wouldn't be scared. 🤷♀️
Being European, I've never seen a tornado in my life, excepting the small dustdevils you get in autumn that are (at most) a metre tall. We have incredibly few natural disasters here. But tornadoes have always scared the bajeezus out of me though, and I couldn't imagine being able to sleep soundly living in tornado country. Between the tornadoes, volcanoes, tsunamis and earthquakes - I'm suprised you guys don't perpetually live in fear.
I'm "European ' too and yeah be happy ya hadn't to endure it. it's pur terror to be in a shtf situation like a tornado flashflood, high water, landslide, thunderstorm with hail big as tomatoes and even earthquakes we may not having it often but depending on the area in Europe you're living, chances are you will have to endure some shtf situation once or twice in your life.
“I’m surprised you guys don’t perpetually live in fear.”
They do. That’s what the guns are for, I guess. 🤷♂️ I recommend being more surprised that they haven’t appointed someone to be “in charge” of tornadoes so that they have a figure to blame and complain to when a twister causes destruction. That’s the American way of dealing with fear. 😏
@@chriskaprys hell yeah sure they will find a Karen to run her trap about shit lol fun a side old wisdom and today's knowledge with a pinch of objectively is a better option than fear stubbornness and stupidity
You should come to Spain and experience a Gota Fria then. The damage is unreal.
Americans do live in perpetual fear. From the government and each other. Why do you think they are so desperate to own all those guns?
Oops someone already said that. O well
I was born in Waco and grew up all in and around Dallas, I feel you Joe. And I now live in California, far from serious earthquake radius, and I enjoy watching Pecos Hank knowing I am safe and sound.
in summer of 2019 there was actually one kinda "major" tornado in Europe in Luxembourg, that passed right in front of my house. it is the only tornado in europe i have ever heard of in my life to actually cause significant material damage as it plowed through 2 towns breaking windows, stripping roofs off of building and breaking a few electricity masts. it was still tiny compared to some of those you get in the US.
"California has Earthquakes.....but here the sky can eat your house!! " I spat my drink out 🤣🤣
lmao same im in cali and thats been my thinking my whole life
I Love Pecos Hank's videos!
I have been watching him for years!
Back in High School (sometime around 1983 I think)(I think I was about 16 years old), on a stormy night in Decatur, Ga., my dad and I drove from our house to downtown to pick up my mother from work. There was heavy rain all of the way there, my dad took his time getting there. Almost as soon as we reached the center of Downtown, the Tornado Sirens started going off. We turned the radio to a news channel and they were reporting a tornado near downtown. We missed the location, so once we picked up mom, we started heading back home. Suddenly, it started down pouring like I had never seen it! Down pouring rain, some hail, strong winds that were blowing the truck almost off the road. The three of us were terrified! Then almost as suddenly, things were back to the normal heavy rainfall.
I don't think we were "in" the tornado, but my dad and I came to the conclusion that we must have been very close to it.
Story from Canada. I remember when I was like 6 or 7, we used to camp at a place near Lake Huron out in the countryside, and it was really windy. I didnt know what was going on, but my mother was visibly spooked as she forced to me to get into a friends tent to weather the storm (There were no proper buildings within like 300 metres of us. We just played Uno while the tent was shaking from the very strong winds. I dont know why I didnt think much of it, but I was too busy playing Uno with a friend to really be scared. It was only a few years later when I asked about it did I learn it was a tornado! Yippee! I wish I could recall more, but it was a long time ago, still dont know why I was not that freaked out about it tho.
Always am excited when I see a new video from you. Means I am gonna laugh, learn something new, and get the old gears turning! Thanks Joe!
I have family in Oklahoma City and saw a special on TV from a well-known weatherman who covers that area, talking about the F5 that hit OKC in 1999, I think. As the storm was developing, he went through some of the standard check list comments like telling people to go to an interior room and not to try to outrun the storm in one's car, but as it grew to F5 territory he realized that going to an interior room wouldn't help and actually told people to flee in their vehicles. The storm scrubbed everything down to the foundation level, which in that part of the country generally means a slab.
My niece was going to OU at the time and working part time as a waitress and she and all the customers stood at the window of the restaurant to watch as this monster was doing its damage in the distance. Since then, Moore (part of greater OKC) has been hit multiple times by severe tornados.
I remember that tornado. I was a Sr in HS, and I lived about an hour south of there. Watched it happen in real time on the news. One of my BFFs was also attending OU at the time, and I went to visit him that weekend. (The trip was planned before the tornado.) The damage was really bad. It has often been described like a bomb went off and just leveled everything. Unfortunately, that's exactly what it looked like. And, what made it even worse is the fact that the bedrock is super hard there, so basements and storm shelters that are located completely underground are extremely rare. And, with an F5, a shelter that's only partially underground won't really do any good. So, I'm not at all surprised people were told to run.
I miss Garry England. He was amazing, plaza towers broke him. I had an employee in the school with her kids, I sent her home to get them. I was in the restroom with the rest of my crew doing my best to keep them calm as it passed. We could feel the air pressure like a heartbeat. Luckily we didn't get hit. I remember not being able to call anyone. We immediately started coffee and food for first responders, and became a staging center for donations.
Fun fact : We had EF4 tornado last year (24/6/2021) right in the middle EU. And yes, its "one for 1000 years thing".
Yes, actually 6/24/2021 in Czech Republic...one of a kind :)
@@jukicdalibor No, it's 24/6/2021. There are only 12 months in a year ;)
@@lemmypop1300 I know, dude :) I'm from Croatia. I wrote the dates the USA way because I guess the others wouldn’t understand. Cheers and all the best !!!
you are all wrong with those silly dates ;~) it was 2021-06-26 (the superior ISO 8601 with sorting included)
@@jukicdalibor Kako si mogao da ti iz Hrvatske počiniš takav ustupak američko-imperijalnom nazadnjačkom sistemu? EU se vrti u grobu... ovaj, glasno negoduje :) Metric & day first dates all the way!
I know I'm late, but +1 for Pecos Hank (love his channel!). Growing up in Wisconsin and now living in Minnesota, we're not strangers to tornadic storms (though certainly not like TX/OK/KS)
I've had a few close calls though thankfully have avoided being in a tornado. A friend of mine however was ripped from her Mother's arms when she was an infant. They found her some time later, bundled up and unharmed in a field. To hear her or her Mother tell the story is one of the wildest things. I can only imagine what that experience was like.
Not only America and Bangladesh have had EF/F5 tornadoes. France, Germany, Canada, Italy and Russia also had several in their history. There also are some suspected cases in Poland and China, for example. Europe sees an F4 tornado every few years, and an F5 tornado every few decades. Parts of Europe such as the UK, the Netherlands and northern Germany have more tornadoes per square kilometer than the US. Especially in europe's tornado alley (ranging from France, the BENELUX-countries, Germany and Poland all the way into western Russia) aswell as in China, tornadoes get as strong and huge as tornadoes in the US and regularly cause dozens of injuries and deaths.
Most of those tornadoes in Europe are not long-tracked, violent ones though. Since 1950, all but 3 F5's have been in the US.
@@bodombeastmode Thats true, most torneadoes in europe aren't long-tracked. Powerful tornadoes in europe usually travel somewhere between 5km (3mi) and 40km (25mi). However, there are exceptions.
The frequency of F5 tornadoes in America is way higher. Which is somewhat logical since there are more than three times as many tornadoes here every year as, for example, in Europe. In addition, ideal conditions regularly prevail in America, which is the absolute exception in Europe. I certainly didn't want to discredit America as the number one tornado country, but tornadoes in other specific parts of the world shouldn't be underestimated.
I had half my roof ripped off in the Netherlands when I still lived there. Freak tornado came through, took half my roof tiles with it, and then proceeded to flatten an entire farm on the other side of the lake down to its foundations. That was the first tornado I had ever even heard of in the Netherlands, and I was born and raised there. This happened I guess maybe 7-8 years ago? From my experience we mainly had nasty “northeastern” storms that would wipe out half the coastline if not the entire coastline way up in to the dunes. But that’s a storm you actually go out to watch. My dad would drive us down to the coast and we’d sit in the car just watching these giant waves crashing in to the dunes. We wouldn’t be in any immediate danger like tornado chasers are, but I still wouldn’t recommend taking a walk in that weather as you could easily get overpowered by a wave and drown.
they may be labelled storms, UK got bad 'storm' in 1987 ...
@@annebell565 That storm would have been more akin to a hurricane than a tornado. We regularly get the afters of the USA's hurricane season, and they are just exceptionally strong storms. Seldom do they spawn tornadoes, though, if at all.
I worked in a liquor store when I experienced my first tornado in Tennessee.
My coworkers said "this is the best place to be during a tornado, we can drink the fear away."
I had to reply "ah yes, death by a thousand shards of glass"
The front doors starting aggressively flapping in the wind. The manager grabbed onto them and got lifted off his feet.
That was an exciting time
Well damn you can't just leave us hanging with that cliffhanger! Did he make it back to the ground safely?
@@kyleknight9686 he survived. There were definitely some terrified screams from my coworkers.
He promptly moved to LA after that
@@robertkent4929 That's hilarious. I'm glad it ended well.
Growing up in Illinois, went out to watch the lightning one night with some friends as a storm rolled in. Set on the top of a hill west of town, enjoying the show Mother Nature was putting on, the wind went dead, and the lightning seemed to stop. I yelled for everyone to get in the car, that we had to go. A moment later, as I spun the car around to race back to town, the sky opened up.
Rain and hail came down so hard, couldn’t even see the end of the hood. We went in and out of the ditches in either side of the road so many times, I don’t know how we didn’t hit anything or get stuck. At one point, I cracked the door to try to figure out where on the road the car was, the wind pushed the door open so hard it yanked me out of the car. We kept moving, painfully slow, driving by braille, as it were, with the right side tires just off the road.
The storm passed us by, leaving only the eerie silence that had preceded it. Hail was piling up in tracks on the road as people started moving around again. Some loose lumber at a construction site had been thrown through a neighbor’s garage, embedded in their walls. I don’t recommend chasing storms at night.
I've had a similar experience. On high cliff/hill, watching the lightening over town creeping closer. When it suddenly went quiet and....BOOM! lightening exploded directly over head striking the ground somewhere near by. Never thought I could experience the ground & air vibrating, it was a literal intensive invisible force. We all hit the deck, and I screamed at everyone that we needed to move now and we nope the eff off that hill and back to the car. The moment we slammed the doors, hail & rain like vertical sheets just fell. Bloody scary stuff mother nature, 10/10 would do again.
I live in Claremore, Oklahoma, and recently an EF3 MONSTER came rolling around at around midnight. At the closest, we we're about 2 miles away from it, and I was close enough I could HEAR it ROAR. Debris was flying everywhere, we had 100+ MPH winds, and the rain and hail was the heaviest ever. We almost took shelter in my mom's closet, but thankfully it wasn't headed our direction...
My hopes and prayers go out to everyone who actually went into the tornado. God bless them. 💗