The Fastest On The Fujita Tornado Scale

Tornado!!!!

Tornadoes are one of the many types of natural disasters that are extremely destructive and devastating. They can be classified based on the intensity of the tornado and they usually form when there are major changes in temperature. The word tornado comes from the Spanish word tronada (which means thunderstorm) and the association tornar (which means to turn).

First of all, what is a tornado? A tornado is a storm that is similar to a hurricane, but it is touching the ground. Tornadoes are formed when cold and warm air collide and intersect. For example, the tornado outbreak that happened on April third though the fourth in 1974 was caused by cold air coming down the U.S. from the Canadian Rockies and warm air coming up the

The Fujita Tornado Scale was invented by Mr. Tetsuya Theodore Fujita, a scientist who observed weather. F-0, the weakest tornado on the Fujita scale, can just snap off tree branches. However, F-5, the strongest on the Fujita Tornado scale, can destroy an entire town. Before the scale was invented, scientists would rate tornadoes by size. This system wasn’t very efficient because sometimes the smaller ones would be more devastating than the larger ones.

On April 3, 1974, in the town of Xenia, Ohio, civilians were living a regular life. Kids were playing on their driveways. People were laughing. It was as if there were no more worries in the world. Everything was normal, until people started running down the street yelling, “Tornado! Tornado! Tornado!” People looked up and instead of seeing a blue sky that was as blue as the ocean, they saw a massive swirling

Mass destruction. In just nine minutes, more than half of Xenia was destroyed. Neighborhoods such as Arrowhead were flattened like a pancake. Vicki Gamble, a survivor of the tornado in Xenia, said, “ There was a moment of eerie quiet. Then, a rush of horrifying winds seemed to be tearing our roof off.” When Vicki and her family crawled out of their hiding place, their house was still standing. However, the neighborhood that was once as lovely as a bouquet of flowers that was outside their window, was gone. In many other states, the same types of destruction happened. In Brandenburg, Kentucky, a tornado flattened three quarters of the buildings and killed thirty-one people. Farther North in Indiana, a tornado picked up a metal warehouse as if it were a feather and dropped it a mile away. Also, in Jasper, Alabama, firefighters escaped their station just seconds before the building and all the fire trucks were demolished. The storm caused destruction for two-thousand five hundred miles. More than three hundred fifteen people were dead and more than five-thousand were injured from those thirteen states and one-hundred forty-eight