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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 May 1999 Issue No. 429 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 May 1999 Issue No. 429
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Books Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Twist again
By Peter Snowdon
On Monday 3 May the United States was hit by the most powerful tornadoes the country has seen in over a decade. Following a night of terror, over 51 people were reported dead in four mid-western states, 41 of them in the state of Oklahoma, where more than 7,000 homes were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable.
Two residents of Oklahoma City sift through the rubble of their home destroyed by tornadoes
(photo: AFP)
The damage was done by over three dozen separate "twisters", as they rampaged northwards through the stretch of land known as "tornado alley" which runs from Oklahoma City in the south, to Wichita, Kansas, in the north.
The toll on human life and property was heaviest in the suburbs of Oklahoma City, which seemed to have been picked out for special attention by the forces of nature. The largest storm gathered about 45 miles southwest of the city, before marching northeast through the suburbs of Moore and Mid West City, where it laid low schools, tower blocks and private houses, indiscriminately. Cars and trucks were tossed about, buildings collapsed like flat-packs, and human beings were felled by flying debris or crushed beneath what was left of their homes.
The carnage brought back memories of the day three years ago, when 168 men and women died in the bombing of the Alfred Murragh building in central Oklahoma City.
Mayor Kirk Humphreys described the storms as "the worst in anyone's memory", while State governor Frank Keating told reporters, "We've got pages and pages of missing people. We've got whole communities that simply aren't there any more... It looks like a huge battle has taken place."
Tornadoes are columns of violently rotating air which reach down from the head of a thunderstorm to the ground below. Though in general they advance quite slowly, wind speeds within the vortex can reach 300 miles per hour, and the paths along which they wreak havoc can be up to one mile wide and fifty miles long.
The United States is the tornado capital of the world. In an average year, 800 tornadoes are reported, which lead to 80 deaths and over 1,500 injuries. Although the subject is so sensitive in California that the LA Times no longer uses the term "tornado" for fear of frightening its readers, preferring to speak euphemistically of "freak winds", the worst tornadoes are generally found in the spring over the Central Plains. Warm moist air moving inland from the Caribbean collides with cooler dry air blowing off the Rocky Mountains. The warm air rises, spiralling as it goes; if this rotation becomes sufficiently violent, the result is a tornado.
Last week's tornadoes were remarkable for their ferocity. The worst lasted some four hours -- one hour is considered an epic in tornado time -- and reached the maximum of 5 on the Fujita scale, which its creator defined as "Incredible Damage". The most vicious tornado in recorded history travelled 219 miles across Missouri, Illinois and Indiana in March 1929, killing 219 people and injuring over 2,700. More recently, around 300 people died during a spate of storms across the mid-west in April 1974, and 90 deaths were recorded in a closely related series of incidents in 1985. Last week's twisters were in the same class as these giants. President Bill Clinton, visiting Oklahoma City on Saturday, told the press this was the most devastating tornado damage he had ever seen. "I have never seen such complete destruction of homes over such a wide area," he declared.
The suffering of the people of Oklahoma brought an immediate response from many different quarters of the nation. Clinton announced that his administration would spend $12 million to create 3,500 temporary jobs for those who have been left without work when their places of employment were destroyed, and that he would be applying to Congress for an additional $372 million in disaster relief. Meanwhile, donations were pouring in from TV viewers, as well as from "concerned" corporations. Ford, Monsanto, Anheuser-Busch and Visa were among the first to pledge money to help house and feed the homeless. Insurers and mortgage lenders announced a three-month period of grace on all instalments for tornado victims. Echo Lane Bowling Alley in Austin, Texas, donated all the proceeds from Friday afternoon's games to the Red Cross, in memory of the day in 1983 when it was itself hit by a tornado. U-Haul Self-Storage offered 30 days free storage to those with nowhere to keep those of their possessions they have been able to salvage, and Priceline.com, the e-commerce start-up controlled by Bill Gates' former colleague Paul Allen, provided free accommodation to volunteer relief workers at a range of selected hotels. The Insurance Information Institute, meanwhile, rapidly issued a list of Tips to Prevent Getting "Ripped-Off" by Fraudulent Service Providers, to warn people to be wary of approaches from over-eager repair men and loss adjusters.
It is ironic that among those in the forefront of capitalist charity -- even if their donations rarely reached six figures -- should be found companies whose products are indirectly implicated in last week's disaster. Of course, there have always been tornadoes -- they are discussed in Aristotle. But last week's stormburst seems to have been due in part to the after-effects of the extraordinary 1997-98 El Nino -- the strongest this century.
The current La Nina -- the cold backlash which sets in to try and dissipate the heat that builds up along the Pacific coast of the Americas during El Nino -- has been in place for almost a year, and has already provoked record snowfall in the northwest states and droughts in Florida. (Most La Nina effects last for only a few months.)
In past La Nina years, the water along the Pacific northwest coast stayed relatively warm. This year, however, the strength of the phenomenon has changed all that. "La Nina has just bored a hole right through the El Nino warm pool," Robin Harger, director of Highspan International Environmental Consultants and an expert on the Pacific climate system, told Al-Ahram Weekly. "Lenses of cold water started to appear off northern California and Baja, California, early last year, and these have progressively developed, but some warm water still lingers around just north of the Equator, and of course in the Caribbean, thus setting the scene for the tornadoes to be generated."
Scientists at the US National Weather Service agree. Steve Byrd, NWS science officer in Omaha, Nebraska, told AP last week that this year's mid-west tornadoes could be traced back to the strong La Nina event, and that they were expecting 1999 to produce a heavier storm count than the average for that reason. So far this year, Nebraska and Iowa have reported 17 tornadoes, five more than the historical average for this date. "We're already living up to predictions," Byrd said.
So, directly or indirectly, the carnage in Oklahoma can be traced back to a process that was set off several years ago in the Pacific warm pool to the north of Indonesia. And that in turn can be traced back to anthropogenic global warming. Without the secular rise in surface temperature which we are currently witnessing, events on the scale of the 1997-98 El Nino would be much rarer than they are now, if not non-existent.
"This is exactly what one would expect of global warming," said Harger. "The atmosphere and the oceans are 'trying' to equilibrate themselves to the increased heat-load. Directly or indirectly, the tornadoes are a consequence of that."
