from Mississippi, through Alabama, Georgia, up through Virginia and beyond. Over 300 dead in Alabama and still about 450 unaccounted for. There were several category 5 twisters in Alabama, with one churning an incomprehensibly long path of destruction of almost 100 miles.Personally I cannot think of a force in nature that intimidates with a combination of power, speed, surprise, randomness and frequency (I have faced tornadoes twice - once in the form of a water spout over Lake Pontchartrain on the north side on New Orleans, the other in my own back yard [I heard the train & saw the funnel rope-whipping near my house and adjacent neighborhood in NJ] - a category 1) . While there are regions of the nation prone to tornadoes, they can show up in places like California, Arizona, New York, Vermont, Maine and elsewhere. If earthquakes make you nervous, avoid settling on the West Coast. If tsunamis strike fear in your heart, avoid coastlines. Volcanoes bother you? Talk to your real estate agent about optional locations. Don't like blizzards? Head South. Hurricanes can pack a wallop from Florida to Maine, The Gulf states and into the interior but typically you get significant advance notice. Floods can be prepared for with levies, and while they can be breached, one chooses whether to live in a flood plain. While an asteroid hit carries the biggest destructive force, most of us can live with the frequency.
Then there is the tornado. You are lucky if you get 15 minutes notice (although the storm
system that just battered the South was projected for several days ... but while one can board up windows for a hurricane, there is virtually no protective measures one can take to survive a direct hit from a tornado). Do you need two hands to count the number of states that are tornado-free? No. A tornado can hit virtually anywhere in North America. While I've seen tornado shelters in big corporate offices located on the plains of metro Dallas, many people have to rely on an interior room with a few pipes in the walls ... in a home built on a slab. In the South this week, complete fire department structures were swept away and turned into rubble. All the natural disasters in the prior paragraph pack a powerful punch too, but in my view, personal choice and/or diligence gives one a shot at safety. However, the tornado ...When humanity faces what appears to be an insurmountable challenge requiring ingenuity, creativity, brain power, (etc.) ... killer diseases have been solved with advances in medicines; flight and then space travel has been conquered; intergalactic vision has been achieved with the Hubble Telescope orbiting the Earth; Dick Tracy-like communicators are now in the pockets of about a billion teenagers worldwide; etc., etc. With at least most of these achievements, what started as science fiction imagination, became a dream pursued and solved.
Now I'll opine on a science fiction dream that hopefully some future scientists and engineers can turn into reality. Imagine a mechanism that could be as affordable and ubiquitous as fire extinguishers that could be a defense mechanism against tornadoes, with any one hand-held 'tornado-extinguisher' having the power to neutralize a tornado. Have you ever even seen that sci-fi concept contemplated anywhere? Sure, this vision/dream is "out there" ... but, could it be akin to a generation ago having a warehouse-sized computer getting miniaturized by the early 21st Century so that the comparable computing power can now reside on a device that fits in one's pocket?
To my knowledge, the dream/challenge I am floating has no serious inquiry. These days weather experts try to improve their predictive abilities about tornadoes. Some chase tornadoes to observe, record and study the phenomena of tornadoes ... all basically with a goal of being better at predicting so that better advance notice can be given so folks have more time to flea or hunker down. I am flipping the paradigm. Rather than run and hide, face it, fight it, kill it.
Where would a person (vastly smarter than me) start with trying to solve this riddle? We know that tornadoes involve conical wind, low pressure, 'almost' all spin counter clockwise in the
northern hemisphere, and other environmental characteristics. In their dissipating stage, tornadoes narrow into shapes resembling tubes or ropes. What causes dissipation? Is there an action that can be taken to accelerate the dissipation process. Is there a way to 'decapitate' a tornado? Is there a way to smother or choke-off the energy source of a tornado? Is there a way to pull-up a tornado (off the ground)? Is there a way to anticipate a emerging weather pattern known to spawn tornadoes, attack and disburse the converging weather patterns before they merge to spawn? What draws a tornado to take a path (terrain?, lower air pressure? other factors?). If factors influencing tornado path direction can be understood, can action be taken to "bait" a tornado to take a different path (i.e.: up, or away from population centers)?This Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado) gives a thorough overview of tornadoes. Of course scientists have studied tornadoes for generations. Scientists studied the stars for centuries ... but not until the the last half century did the will and determination get focused on achieving space flight.
It is so painful to watch the suffering of those victimized by annual tornadoes. While one of the most popular TV shows in recent years ("Extreme Makeover") celebrates significant improvements to a home per week for their ~20-25 week season, think of the hundreds (and in years like 2011 - thousands) of homes destroyed by tornadoes. Frankly I am sick of humanity getting terrorized by these beasts.
To rehash a cliched call to action from half a century ago " ... if we can put a man on the moon in less than a decade, then ... " (let's figure out how to kill tornadoes!). Nothing is impossible to determined innovators!
