I’ll admit it: I was one of those kids who hid behind the couch when the tornado lashed the Kansas prairie in the early scenes of The Wizard of Oz. My parents could only coax me back out into the open by assuring me that no such thing would ever happen here in New England.
So imagine my surprise, while working on a Massachusetts vegetable farm 10 years ago, when I looked up one morning to see that the sky had an almost Hollywood appearance of swirling gray clouds against an angry black backdrop. Within minutes, a curtain of wind and rain was advancing up the fields towards us, pulling the wheelbarrows and harvest baskets out of our hands as we dashed for the safety of the barn.
We were lucky. The straight-line winds that hammered our farm only managed to tear a few acres of forest off a nearby ridge top. A few miles to the south, however, a tornado touched down for more than a mile, gobbling up a number of cars and even a house. Right here in New England.
To give them credit, my parents weren’t entirely wrong about tornados in New England. They are indeed rare. But that still leaves them room to be far more common than most people care to admit.
The reason we don’t have “Auntie Em! Auntie Em!” twisters in our twin states is a simple matter of topography. Everything is too chopped up. Our valleys are relatively narrow and tight, our peaks diffuse the energy of big storms, and the multiple storm tracks that converge over New England have a way of keeping the weather moving before enormous thunderheads can develop.
That’s not the case in the Kansas of movies or of real life. Over the vast plains of the center of the continent, thunderstorms spring up that can last for days. Not “scattered thunderstorms” that last for days, but individual thunderheads themselves. Once one becomes large and strong enough to sustain itself through the darkness of night, it is able to grow to enormous size in subsequent days as the sun throws more proverbial fuel on the fire.
Eventually, all the air being heated by the sun and sucked up inside the thunderhead causes the thunderhead to slowly rotate. (That’s thanks to the Coriolis effect, a result of the Earth spinning around its axis.) Occasionally, and at moments that are not entirely understood by meteorologists, bursts of wind underneath the rotating thunderhead funnel into the center of the storm and, like a figure skater pulling her arms in close during a spin, suddenly accelerate to tremendous speed. Presto, tornado.
Such a thunderhead wouldn’t last long over New England. Our mountain ranges act like breakwaters, deflecting and dispersing energy and preventing thunderheads from growing large enough or lasting long enough for the Coriolis effect to cause an organized rotation.
But this is not to discount the phenomenon of the New England tornado altogether. Colliding weather fronts can, like waves crashing together on a beach, occasionally bring together enough energy to replicate the conditions that would otherwise take days to form in a single cloud.
If New England has a “tornado alley,” it’s the area east of the Berkshires in central Massachusetts. On June 9, 1953, a tornado reaching a mile in width lashed a 46-mile-long strip in central Massachusetts. Ninety-four people were killed in Worcester and neighboring towns.
Other noteworthy tornados in local history are the “Adirondack Tornado” of 1845, which concluded a 275-mile run by crossing Lake Champlain and tearing roofs and chimneys apart in Burlington, and the 1954 tornado that hit Caribou, Maine, in May and dug up the newly planted potatoes. Even Hanover, New Hampshire, has seen a twister: on July 16, 1880, a half-mile-wide tornado tore down the Connecticut River valley.
But these tornados are the exception, not the rule. Mini-tornados and micro-burst windstorms are far more common: brief bursts of energy from thunderheads or cold fronts that can blow down a few acres of hay, remove the big trees along Main Street, or even re-park a car or two. But nothing capable of transporting you (and your house) to Oz.
I don’t begrudge my parents their “not in New England” explanation one bit, oversimplified though it was. But now that I’m an adult, I confess I wouldn’t mind seeing a whole house get picked up some day by the wind – imagine that! Just as long as it’s the Hollywood version in which the house returns to earth unscathed and the good guys wake up in Technicolor.
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