Desperate Hours

In this episode, you can run for cover but you can’t hide from the wild winds. That means hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, twisters and typhoons. They’re all pretty much different names for the same thing, no? Powerful wind storms. Well no, not necessarily. Hurricanes mostly form over warm ocean water and once they have gathered momentum, can be up to 600 miles across. A tornado on the other hand, is a rapidly spinning tube of air which touches both the ground and the clouds above. In the US, they are often referred to as twisters. Did you know that hurricanes twist and turn in anticlockwise fashion in the Northern Hemisphere but in a clockwise direction in the Southern Hemisphere? Or that tornadoes can travel at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour? They can demolish large buildings, uproot trees and pick up and hurl vehicles hundreds of feet away, as if they were mere playthings. A tornado’s path of destruction can be anywhere in excess of a one mile wide, and some 50 miles long. 1000 tornadoes are reported in the United States in a typical year. Fortunately, only two percent of these are labeled “violent”, but that’s enough to create plenty of havoc annually.