You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
The Tornadoes that ripped through the South Eastern United States April 27th.
Like laser guided bombs, Tornadoes descended from super cells that raced from Mississippi to North Carolina like B-52 bombardiers in a war scarred sky.
Along the way these harbingers of doom churned up homes and lives like sausage in a grinder.
Hundreds are dead. Thousands are without clean water. Millions are without power. Everyone is awe-struck by the calamity.
It’s so overwhelming, it’s hard to fathom. It’s hard to look at it and understand it. The brain just doesn’t recognize piles of rubble that were once neighborhoods and shopping centers and places of worship.
The news is filled with tornado footage so amazing, its unlike anything we have ever seen before.
It use to be that just capturing the image of a tornado was amazing. Now we get cell phone video, news video, surveillance footage, police dash cam footage, tower cam video, and even dept of transportation video.
No matter what cam it is, they all show images of fire breathing tornadoes spitting blood from an angry sky.
Wednesday April 27th was a day that Southerners will talk about in hushed disbelief for years to come.
Weather casters say more than 167 tornadoes spawned in one day. Those are numbers only the Octo-mom can appreciate.
It’s insane.
One tornado, the one that destroyed Tuscaloosa and headed to Birmingham was reportedly an EF 5 with winds over 200 miles an hour. That’s the speed of an Indy Race car if that race car was two thousand feet wide and devouring everything in its path.
This spawn of Satan sliced through the south cutting a hole in the Earth for over 100 miles. At times this black, swirling demon was a half mile wide. It had teeth and anger and no regard for human life or property.
The numbers are astounding. 204 dead in Alabama 33 deaths in Tennessee. almost 300 dead across the south.
It tore through towns like a chain saw tears through trees. It ruined more lives than a season of Maury Povich.
Venerable weather casters looked at the imagery in shock as entire rooves and parts of homes swirled in the vortex cloud. It looked like a gigantic sock spinning in a dryer on fire.
People were sucked out of cars only to be erased from the face of the Earth.
I listened to an Alabama couple whose SUV was sucked into the air and spun around and around and around for 15 seconds.
Can you imagine your car spinning above the shopping center you came to patronize for 15 seconds?
That’s absurd.
The family says the cloud dropped them on the asphalt and they climbed out of their sun roof, battered, smashed, but alive.
Amazing stories of survival.
They say this was the perfect storm of bad. A northern front of wintry winds converging with warm moist air out of the gulf.
It’s like adding GAS AND FIRE.
WOOOOSH!
The mechanism ignites like a super charged lawn mower and then spins the atmosphere like a top.
In this case the top was energized by atomic fury and power not seen for a generation.
Life is precious and the demon that spun from the sky reminds all to cherish each and every tick, even if that ride is 15 seconds long.
And that is crazy. ™