A killer tornado in ... New Hampshire?
Posted Jul25, 2008 at 06:34 PM
Photo by The Associated Press -- A home was destroyed along a lake in Deerfield, N.H.
File this away in the "Tornadoes can hit there, too" department. Almost no one thinks of New Hampshire and tornadoes together. But on Thursday, a tornado ripped through 9 New Hampshire towns, killing a 57-year-old woman who was trapped in a collapsed house. According to an Associated Press article, the EF-2 tornado (winds of 111-135 mph, rated on a scale from EF-0, 65-85 mph winds, to EF-5, 200-plus mph winds) tore through Deerfield, Epsom, Barnstead, Alton, New Durham, Wolfeboro, Ossipee, Effingham and Freedom. At least 6 homes were destroyed and hundreds were damaged.
Photo by The Associated Press -- An aerial view of the flattened home above.
Tornadoes are not as unusual as it might seem in New England. The June 9, 1953, tornado in Worcester, Mass., killed 94 people. The severe weather threat peaks in that region from June to August, when temperatures warm up enough to destabilize the atmosphere, and the jet stream sometimes roars overhead, capable of spinning some storms into supercells, which in turn can spawn tornadoes when a rotating updraft becomes sufficiently intense and stretched to the surface. Conditions were very favorable for such rotating updrafts in New England on Thursday. It was part of the same system that brought us
severe weather earlier this week, but closer to surface low pressure supplying stronger low-level winds and under much stronger winds aloft.
Comments
[July 25, 2008 8:51 PM]
Roanoke.FoundI'll attest to that. Sure, Nassau County NY is a fairly flat place, but it is built up to the point the wind funnels down streets more than it blows across them.
But this was years before the 'nado hit Brooklyn, completely shattering every NY'ers thoughts of "being safe from that."
I once overheard someone say tornado's never hit at night - and attempt some bad science to explain it.
I wonder what it's going to take to get the message across - anywhere, anytime.
[July 25, 2008 10:52 PM]
Kevin MyattWhere I grew up (Arkansas), most of the bad tornadoes hit at night ... town after town and city after city all over the country has had its own ridiculous theory why a tornado couldn't hit there, only to be proven wrong ... and not all of them are somewhere you wouldn't expect to hit, but right smack in the middle of Tornado Alley ...
[July 28, 2008 10:17 AM]
Carter Elliott : →http://carterelliott.comIn 1938 in Indiana my sixth grade teacher was frightened to tears when it became pitch dark outside. A class clown put his head on his desk and started snoring. Then hail beat down an cracked a window. The principal rang the fire bell and we all assembled in the hallway. When school broke for summer my friends and I went "mushrooming" and came across a wooded plain where all trees had been knocked down and twisted up from their roots. If that tornado had happened today, many would have been killed as it's now a residential development.