Tornado confirmation justifies hurricane preparations
Except for the fact that there were no personal injuries, few people see a silver lining in the tornado that spun off Hurricane Irene last Saturday evening. With funnel winds in the 95-mile-per-hour range, the tornado nearly destroyed one home while causing thousands of dollars' worth of damage to dozens of other properties during its short visit. The twister uprooted a number of 50-foot trees while snapping off other large and perfectly healthy trees as if they were kindling.
Other than the tornado’s sudden and severe power, Irene’s winds in Delaware’s Cape Region - with the highest gusts clocked by the National Weather Service at 66 miles per hour - didn’t technically reach the 70-mph threshold that constitutes hurricane strength. On the Boardwalk in Rehoboth, the highest gusts recorded at the Delaware Environmental Observation System station were 45 miles per hour. They came at 6:11 p.m., just when the storm was hitching itself up to spin off the Lewes tornado.
Anyone who felt some of those gusts, or has seen the damage done by the brief tornado, gains a sense of what sustained winds of 70 mph and higher would do to our part of the world. The outages and flooding we had were bad enough but amount to nothing compared to the widespread damage and long-term outages that would have resulted if the entire Cape Region had been swept by the magnitude of those tornado winds. Trees and wires would have been down everywhere, and our lives and economy would have been brought to a complete standstill.
The tornado’s destruction confirmed the wisdom of extensive preparations and evacuations demanded by the grim forecast. People responded seriously. And when National Weather Service emergency signals and news media alerted people to the impending tornado threat, people - prepared for the worst - hustled for cover and sent warnings out to friends and neighbors. At Beebe Medical Center, advance preparation allowed dozens of patients to be quickly moved out of potential harm's way when its command center received the twister warnings.
Seeing the limited but severe destruction caused by the tornado makes us realize just how important our preparations were and how lucky we are that the full strength of the predicted hurricane didn’t strike our whole region.
