Tornado strikes Auckland, NZ

Post Reply New Topic

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110503/ap_ ... nd_tornado

This proves that these things can hit anywhere at any time.

Saw the pictures. It was awful and a death toll I read of 236.

I'm always worried about living in a trailer park. No basements or nearby places to hide if and when a tornado were to hit...

Tornados everywhere. I hope those in NZ get the help they need to rebuild. I think mother nature is pitchin' a fit over global warming....this is not a good omen for hurricane season...they say it is going to be bad.
Either way I hope everyone on WP in NZ is safe.
keep us posted.

Jojo

Cricky! Where not in Kansas, are we mate?

ruveyn

I read about this one. I thought tornadoes could not form near mountainous areas.. Auckland is in a hilly area with mountains so I guess it was wrong.

The Super Outbreak in 1974 disproved a lot of myths about tornadoes. People used to think that they wouldn't follow the terrain, that they didn't cross rivers, or strike large metropolitan areas.

They can form anywhere that warm, moist air collides with cold, dry air. And they can also be spawned by hurricanes.

Yes Tornadoes are not just for Americans in the midwest anymore.

Tornado alley used to be more or less the same area as the wheat belt- the Texas to the dakotas open prarie midsection of the USA- thus giving rise to the assumption that tornadoes need expansive open country.

But tornado alley has expanded to include the deep and not so deep south with its more hilly and more heavily wooded and cluttered landscape. Likewise New Zealand.

You used to rarely hear about tornadoes outsided the USA. I remember a typhoon hit Bangladesh in the seventies and it basically morphed into a hundred tornodoes as it moved inland killing thousands. Then there was the classic black and white era hollywood movie bioopic about the nineteenth centurey Frenchman who made his dream of building the Suez Canal into a reality. At a dramatic point the dream almost dies when work in the canal stops because a tornado destroys all of the earth moving equipment at the worksite.

I dont know if that really happend or not. Tornadoes are about the only kind of violence you dont hear about in the modern middle east in recent decades.

This alledged suez tornado, the bangladesh incident, and this New Zealand thing are the only three non-american tornado incidents Ive ever heard of.

Does anyone else know of any more non-American tornadoes?

We even get them in the UK,although very rarely are they significant enough to make the news.

An exception was in 2005 when a violent tornado struck Birmingham in England with winds of 130 mph.No-one was killed but it
caused extensive damage (coincidentally the place in UK worst affected is the one that your Alabama city took its name from !)
In 2007 a series of tornadoes also caused damage across several southern English counties.

It was strange, that tornado. It killed 1 person, and injured 14. Luckily it was not a big one. It was a very unusual sight. We tend to get tropical storms here, but never tornados.

It struck the Albany Mega Centre (a super sized strip mall in the north of Auckland). Up to 2 dead, with at least 20 serious injuries. One of the dead was a civil-engineer working for local-government, examining the roof of the Centre when the tornado struck.

The Mega Centre has since reopened with over half it's shops functioning.

The tornado was measured as an F2. It continued south, damaging homes, apparently following the main roadways which are warmer than the surrounding berms and front-lawns, passed through Birkenhead suburb and over the harbour before dissipating over Pt Chevalier.

New Zealand does have tornadoes from time to time, just not as intense as the ones that hit tornado alley and the southern US.