Tornado Journal Entry

Killer Twister Rips Two States (November 7, 2005)

A pre-dawn tornado ripped across northern Kentucky and southern Indiana early this week. At least twenty-two people were killed, mostly in a trailer park in Evansville, Indiana. Five of the victims died in the city of Newburgh to the east. It's Indiana's deadliest tornado since 1974, when a swarm of tornadoes killed 47 people and destroyed over 2,000 homes.

The deadly twister roared through the area while most people were asleep and didn't hear tornado warning signals. The tornado cut a 20-mile (30-kilometer) long path of destruction across the region, ripping out trees and everything else in its path. Entire blocks were turned into piles of rubble.

Meteorologists say the twister was at least an F3 on the Fujita tornado intensity scale, which ranges from F0 to F5. An F3 twister has winds of between 158 and 206 miles per hour (253 and 330 kilometers per hour).

Until this week's disaster, 2005 had seen a relatively low number of tornado-related deaths in the United States. This year, twisters had killed 10 people in the nation, most recently in Mississippi. On September 24, one person died in that state from a tornado formed by the remnants of Hurricane Rita. For the first time ever, there were no deaths reported nationwide from April through June, the heart of hurricane season.

Tornadoes are spawned during thunderstorms in low, heavy cumulonimbus clouds. They are most likely to form when a mass of cool, dry air collides with a mass of warm, moist air. Large columns of warm air rise quickly to create an area of extremely low pressure. Cool, dry air rushes downwards as strong winds begin whirling around the center of low pressure. As the winds increase in strength, the funnel-shaped cloud touches down on the ground, where debris gets sucked up and blasted outward.