Learn fun facts about tornadoes!
Tornado Spotlight: Greensburg, Kansas
At 9:45 p.m. on the night of Friday, May 4, 2007, a tornado destroyed 95% of the town of Greensburg, Kansas. The tornado was 1.7 miles wide, and Greensburg is only 2 miles wide! Also, it was an EF-5 tornado (the highest rating) and had winds over 200 miles per hour!
A Greensburg home destroyed by the tornado. Photo by Michael Raphael, FEMA.
Nearly all the homes and businesses were destroyed, and workers hauled away over 80,000 truckloads of trash and debris. Soon after the tornado struck, the town decided to rebuild as a “green” town. There is even a new environmentally-friendly school being built to replace the damaged one. The school will have:
- A wind turbine for electricity;
- Geothermal heating and cooling;
- Water-saving controls;
- A lot of indoor sunlight and an outdoor classroom area; and
- A green roof.
To learn more about Greensburg and how students are helping to rebuild the town, watch the Planet Green TV series online.
- The highest wind speed ever recorded in a tornado was 302 mph! That’s faster than the fastest NASCAR race speed ever recorded. This tornado touched down in Oklahoma in 1999.
- The U.S. Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Service) did not allow the word “tornado” to be used in weather forecasts until 1950. Little was know about tornadoes and using the word caused a lot of people to panic.
- Tornadoes can have different shapes; a “wedge” tornado is thick (about as wide as it is tall), while a “rope” tornado is very thin and looks like a rope or snake.
- Every year at the National Weather Festival, tornado chasers from around the country display their weather-chasing vehicles at the Storm-chaser Car Show. The vehicles feature various weather stations and monitoring equipment, and some even have broken windows and dents from large hail and flying debris.
- Objects like wood, chickens, horses, cows, cars and even people can be lifted by tornadoes and carried long distances. In 1966, a tornado lifted a car into the air and dropped it on top of a 70-foot building – both passengers survived. In 2006, a girl and her horse were lifted into the air and dropped off unharmed 1,000 feet away.
A wood plank was flung into the side of a refrigerator during a tornado. Photo courtesy of the National Severe Storms Laboratory.