When we decided to retire and move away from California, my wife had one priority.
She didn’t want to live anywhere there was a good chance we would be hit by natural disasters — earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding … oh, and tornadoes.
When we settled on Georgia south of Atlanta, we knew it wasn’t earthquake country. We were far enough inland that hurricanes wouldn’t do much more to us than heavy rain, and at nearly 1,000 feet above sea level, flooding wouldn’t be a problem either.
As for tornadoes, we saw on Wikipedia that there had been one that hit our city about 40 years earlier.
That seemed like a reasonable risk to take.
Of course, before we had been here six months, a tornado hit and did damage as close as about seven miles from where we live. It completely leveled a couple of commercial buildings and wiped out a small unincorporated community a few miles farther away.
Just a fluke, I guess. In more than 10 years since, there has never been another one.
Tornado Country seems to be mostly the Midwest, although there are exceptions.
The disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” showed Los Angeles, my old stomping ground, devastated by tornadoes. While earthquakes and tsunamis are more likely, let’s not forget Mount Wilshire from the pre-millennial film “Volcano.”
Of course that’s just fiction. What happened this past weekend in Kentucky and surrounding states was truth, and indeed, truly horrific. As I write this, the death toll is 74 and about 100 other people are missing and certainly some of them are dead too.
A great deal of the damage from tornadoes is done wherever the storm touches down. Apparently in this case, the major storm touched down and stayed down for more than 200 miles in Kentucky.
Certainly the most horrific damage was in Mayfield in western Kentucky, where the complete leveling of a candle factory could have resulted in massive death numbers. There were 110 employees in the building, and amazingly, 102 of them survived. Eight were killed.
Kentucky Governor Andy Bashear called it “our Christmas miracle.”
The Biden Administration acted promptly and effectively. This may be an exaggeration, but some of the victims said FEMA showed up when they were still filling out the paperwork to request them. And to folks who hate government, this is one of the reasons we have a government — to deal with disasters.
It may not be a great Christmas for many of these people, but maybe we can at least be grateful that the death toll wasn’t even higher than it may turn out to be.
That’s not much of a silver lining — unless you were one of the ones who survived.