Tornado Occurances Highest In 40 Years

Though I have written several posts here in the last few months about Tornado Preparedness and safety, and Warning Signs of an Approaching Tornado, I feel it is important to once again create another post about this topic.

Though some who follow this blog closely may be asking why, once you have some of the facts you will see how important this is.

For instance so far this year there have been 116 deaths related to tornadoes, the highest in almost twenty years. There have been 1520 reported tornadoes this year the highest number in almost 40 years. To put this in perspective, last year there was 1085 total tornadoes, in 2006 there were 1106 tornadoes, and in 2005 there were 1264 tornadoes.

Unfortunately tornadoes have been hitting more heavily populated areas this year as well.

In the last 24 hours tornadoes have touched down in Kansas, Iowa, and Minnesota. In Iowa, a tornado stuck and devastated a local Boy Scout camp where 4 young boys died and 48 were injured. Ironically the Boy Scouts had tornado safety training the day before.

In Kansas, two persons were killed and the tornado caused an estimated $20 million USD in damage. The university's Wind Erosion Laboratory was destroyed and a building the housed a nuclear reactor was also damaged. Though the reactor was left undamaged.

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Photo Credit: NOAA Photo Library, NOAA Central Library; OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL)