Big news and many phone calls. A tornado has hit about 3/4 of a mile from my house over here in Blighty. Birmingham’s notorious for its freaks, but not normally for freaky weather. My grandmother called, my sister called, friends from Singapore called: “Are you dead?”
If we’d been hurt, would I really be answering the phone?
My mom was driving my grandfather through the area of Birmingham that it hit just about 5 minutes before the tornado landed in an area called Moseley in South Birmingham. She said that the sky looked eerily green and yet turbulent when they were driving along at about 2:45.
A friend tells me that the hospitals around the Selly Oak area, near where the storm centred, had to close their operating theaters because of leaks through the roofs. Around 20 people were injured, 3 seriously.
A Met office spokesperson said: “We have an average of 33 reports of tornadoes in the UK each year but these are especially rare in built-up areas and there has not been one of this strength in many years. “City centres are not the natural habitat of a tornado; the tall buildings would normally stop their formation.”
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I used to live in Iowa, so by all rights should be taking an infuriatingly blasé attitude about this news (“Yes, isn’t it just thrilling and beautiful when the clouds turn green?” “What, only one twister? What a pathetic little storm.”). On the other hand, I also know just how arbitrary, unpredictable and deadly they can be.
Even so, the idea of a tornado in Birmingham seems to rank right up there with blizzards in the Gobi Desert for cognitive dissonance. At least no one was killed.
It is faintly surreal and unbelievable.