The Hand Of God

Having just written about horrible emergency possibilties due to tornados around here it makes the Kansas tornado tragedy even more focused in my mind. What a horror to have to live through. I know tornados can do unspeakable damage but it's not usually so concentrated, or devasating. Possibly because they don't normally seem to hit really big towns as much. I've always thought that it was the concentration of many sizes of buildings that kept the winds broken up and disapated the destructive capabilities of tornados in large towns and cities. To be sure I knew that they do hit them sometimes. In fact when I lived up in a suburb of Chicago -- and it's VERY concentrated and tight up there I remember when I was about 10 or 11 a tornado hit the suburb right next to us and took out part of the high school, and a few roofs. Still that's NOTHING compared to what happened in Kansas.

The type of destruction that happened in Kansas happens often enough out here in the country. Lots of open prairie and crop fields give berth to high winds with nothing at all to stop them. Barns, houses, and buildings like that are often blown apart by a passing twister. However, the damage is usually 'minimal' if you could say that. To the families owning the barn or house, it is certainly not minimal, but the destruction is usually limited to a few properties over a mile or two since there is such distance between each homestead.

I feel so sorry for the people in Kansas that lost everything. There were so many, and the losses were so complete. They don't even know yet how many folks lost their lives to the twister, but they do know that the advance 20 minute warning did give a lot of folks time to evacuate. That's a good thing, but I wonder how many kind of shrugged off the warning and chose to hide in a basement or hallway thinking they were safe enough. I think I might have too since I've never seen anything around here that would average more than an F2 or 3 and like I said, even though there are odds, they're usually more or less in your favor that the most you'd loose is a roof, or some shingles. That thing that hit Kansas had to be a 5--the 'Hand of God' as it was called in the popular movie Twister (one of my favorite movies). I hope and pray never to see such destruction up close and personal... but then again, I suppose it's just a matter of time.