"Dorothy," you may remember, if you ever read The Wizard of Oz, "lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife". And just as Alice's great adventure started when she toppled down a rabbit hole, Dorothy's began when the family home was lifted by a "cyclone".
"The house whirled around two or three times and rose slowly through the air. The north and south winds met where the house stood and made it the exact centre of the cyclone. In the middle of a cyclone the air is generally still, but the great pressure of the wind on every side of the house raised it up higher and higher, until it was at the very top of the cyclone; and there it remained and was carried miles and miles away as easily as you could carry a feather." This sort of thing would never happen here, of course, or could it? In fact, occasionally it does, albeit on a less dramatic scale, one of the most noteworthy occasions being 30 years ago today, on August 8th, 1967, at Killeagh, Co Cork. However, in both cases (in Killeagh and with Uncle Henry's little home in Kansas) the villain was not a cyclone, the name given in some parts of the world to a hurricane, but that enfant terrible of meteorology, the tornado.
The Cork twister came at 4.30 a.m. and in the course of its brief destructive life it carved a swathe of havoc 300 feet wide along a five-mile track between the neighbouring villages of Killeagh and Curraheen. Ricks of hay were lifted into the air and scattered over a wide area, slates were ripped from houses and trees were felled or stripped of foliage.
The most destructive tornadoes occur on the continental mainlands of Asia and the United States. Dorothy, in fact, was living in one of the most vulnerable regions of the world, since on some days more than 20 tornadoes are reported in the notorious Tornado Alley, the flat plains of the Midwest of the US, stretching from Texas through Oklahoma and Kansas up to Illinois.
Every year there are an estimated 50 or 60 tornadoes in the south of England, and now and then they occur in Ireland. The frequency here is less probably than 10 a year. Irish tornadoes are considerably less vicious than their continental cousins, and not, as a general rule, life-threatening, but they do leave a substantial trail of damage nonetheless.
