We Got Cows
When I was a kid, my grandmother used to tell a story about a tornado that roared through her family’s farm when she was young. The twister, she said, took the roof off the barn and lifted the cow right out, leaving the barn standing. The next day, when the storm was over, they found the cow calmly munching grass in a field a mile away.
I loved this story, and thought of my grandmother when I heard the “We got cows” line in the movie Twister. But to be perfectly honest, I didn’t believe my grandmother. Now, I think I might owe her an apology. Thanks to intrepid storm chasers and their video cameras, we now have documentary evidence of tornadoes lifting things much bigger than cows — 18-wheelers, for example — and depositing debris (though perhaps not trucks and cows) many miles from where they picked it up.
Large trucks aren’t the only things tornados toss around. In 1973, an F-3 tornado in Louisiana picked up a two-week-old infant and carried the wee babe nearly 400 feet before putting it down. I can’t say before “gently” putting it down, but even so the baby received only minor injuries. It was astonishing that the storm lifted a baby, but 400 feet is nothing for one of these storms. On April 11, 2011, a series of tornadoes roared through the Southeast, strewing debris as they went. John Knox, a weather and climate scientist at the University of Georgia, assembled a dataset of photographs and other personal items found after those historic tornadoes. Some of the objects ended up more than 200 miles from their starting point.
So how do tornados manage this? It’s not entirely clear, but most experts think the enormous suction of the spiraling winds pulls objects into the storm’s center, where the winds keep the objects (photos, babies, cows, whatever) aloft as the tornado races along. If debris gets caught in the updrafts, it can shoot right out the top of the storm and be carried along the jet stream for a while before coming down far from home. (Even if that explanation is correct, it doesn’t explain how the cow and the baby survived the ordeal.) I know this sounds a lot like The Wizard of Oz, but tornados are almost as mysterious as they are powerful.
Because scientists can’t get inside these monster storms to observe what’s going on in there, they have to make do with evidence left by the debris trail, along with a knowledge of how wind works. But however tornados pull this off, they really do pick up and drop things — sometimes big things — and carry them, if not to Oz, at least to some pretty far-flung places.
So, yeah, I owe my grandmother an apology. And these days, whenever it storms, I always keep an eye out for falling cows.