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There are all kinds of strange artifacts after a tornado has gone through. Now a caution,
uh, viewers, that kids have been found pounding straws and nails into telephone poles and
pounding two by fours into other structures to carry as artifacts of a tornado when they've
actually created them. The fact is trees, for example, trees can be twisted by the wind
but not blown down and as they twist just to the point of breaking, cracks open in the wood and any debris in
the air flies into that crack in the wood. Old vinyl records have flown into the crack
of the tree, then the wind stops and the tree comes back up and that vinyl record or straw
or whatever is caught in the tree. So you see funny things after the storm. I've seen
house damage where the roof, apparently, had just begun to lift off the house and the pressure
in the house blew insulation out between the roof and the wall, the roof comes back down
when the wind stops and there's insulation hanging out like a collar around the top of
that house so some strange views but most of it can be explained naturally.
A lot of our field work has shown that, you know, three or four people can be in a room
when a tornado hits and tragically, one person is seriously injured or killed and the other
two or three walk away unscathed or more commonly two or three houses in a neighborhood. One
house is totally flattened, the tornado hit all the houses and the other ones are still
standing. People wonder why was that house flattened and chosen for destruction, perhaps,
and the other two or three are OK yet? And it's really the structure of the tornado.
The tornado is just not one big solid cloud the way that video seems to show it. The tornado
has a really complex wind structure inside, so it may be a quarter mile wide but the wind
speeds and the directions in there are very complex and almost chaotic so we can see
very strong damage in a very narrow swathe and minimal damage elsewhere.
Ted Fujita pioneered the concept of assessing the wind speed and the strength of the storm
based on the damage he saw on the ground. He flew hundreds and hundreds of miles of
tornado tracks in his years and guidelines have been developed that way to estimate the
wind speed based on the damage. I was part of a panel about ten years ago that reassessed
the Fujita Scale because it came to be observed that it probably didn't take as much wind
speed to do that kind of damage as the Fujita Scale originally said so at the end of the
meetings of this panel, we had, the Fujita Scale wind speeds had been slightly adjusted
to probably reflect better the damage versus wind speed connection.
We teach a class called Natural Disasters here in the Geography Department, it has very
good enrollment, about fifty people per year. Um, we cover all the natural disasters like
earthquakes, volcanos, tsunami. We also do the, uh, meteorological disasters like tornados
and hurricanes. We also do landslides and wildfires and so on. We look at this, these
events from the physical viewpoint, that is, where do they occur, where are high-risk areas,
what's the physical mechanism, what causes them? How frequently do they occur? But being
in geography, we also look at the human component, too. So we're very interested in how people
prepare for or react to or survive these different natural disasters. Um, I'm always incorporating
my own research into the course. We've done field work after tornados. We've done field
work with hurricanes. We've taken students out into the field. We've done windtunnel
work on storms so I'm always incorporating our own research here from Kent State into
the course and students find that very relevant, I think, because they really connect when
they can connect with the group doing the research. So They're taking this out into
whatever discipline they are going into. It may be publbic health, it may be international
business, it may be sociology, justice studies, psychology, uh, education certainly. I have
many teachers, future teachers taking the course and I'm thinking I might be touching
dozens of more students as they go out into their classrooms in the future in Ohio or
elsewhere, so. I really like the feeling of conveying the research that we've done here
and the research that others have done to the students and, uh, knowing they're going
to be using this in the future in their own careers.