Tornadoes

Tornadoes are associated with violent storms, and most everyone is familiar with them. While *of course* tornado severity is generally unpredictable, and small tornadoes can occur in the South, as well as large tornadoes can pop up in the North, my experience living in the Great Lakes area is simply that tornadoes were not as awful as those in the South. 

As a child, we had tornado warning frequently enough – storms can be nasty here, especially coming across the Great Plains. But when a tornado hit, it was often nearly surgical. One house here, and the next house virtually untouched. A bad tornado might take out a block (though often only one side of the street). 

My first experience with a Southern tornado was the one which hit Tuscaloosa in 2011. My company had a small location there as well as a landfill. While the landfill was not damaged really (hard to hurt a landfill), the rest of the site (and much of the town) were utterly destroyed. I’d not seen anything like it in the US from a tornado (I am rather news-oblivious, as I’m certain there were others when I was younger). The later that year Joplin, MO was hit even worse. 

Tornadoes in Florida are not super-common, as I’m guessing the narrow landmass is more conducive to hurricane damage rather than the types of storms which generate tornadoes, but overall in the South tornadoes seem to be massive. Whole counties are seriously damaged, on a scale exceeded only by a hurricane.

Up North in the Great Lakes area, the worst natural disasters I've experienced are winter storms, where the greatest danger is the large vehicle pile-ups in white-out conditions on the highways. When we get several feet of snow, we dig out and move on. You can’t do that as easily after one of the huge southern storms.