Dangerous Day: Strong, Long-Lasting Tornadoes Menace Large Area In South

Area in pink is under a high risk of tornadoes today and tonight
The broad red area surrounding the pink also has a 
significant risk of strong tornadoes.

UPDATE: 12:30 p.m. EDT

The National Weather Service at this out is expected at any minute to issue a special type of tornado warning called a Particular Dangerous Situation warning.

This is reserved for the rare times when a weather hazard is especially, super life-threatening.

All the ingredients seem to be coming together, especially in Mississippi and Alabama, for a prolonged period this afternoon and tonight with a strong risk of intense, long-lasting tornadoes. 

There is one area in particular along the Mississippi/Alabama border where 

there is a 45 percent chance of a tornado within 25 miles within a given point in that zone.

That is really an extraordinarily high risk, among the top probabilities on record. This is only the sixth time in the past 15 years in which there was such a high risk. 

I honestly don't know how we're going to get through today and tonight without tornado fatalities. Just praying the strongest, longest lasting tornadoes stay out over rural, open country. 

This tragic show should begin by mid-afternoon. 

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION:

Thunderstorms, a few of them severe, were roaming around parts of Texas and Oklahoma early this morning, clueing us in to what will be a dangerous tornado day in many southern U.S. states.  

I already saw at least one tornado warning in Arkansas before dawn today. 

NOAA's Storm Prediction Center (SPC) pasted a high risk zone for severe weather, including the likelihood of strong, long-tracked tornadoes in an area centered around Mississippi.  

The SPC has five alert levels for severe storms, "high" obviously signaling the biggest danger.  

High risk storm alerts are fairly rare, only being issued on average once or twice a year. 

A broad area encompassing most of Alabama, much of Louisiana and Arkansas and southwestern Tennessee is in almost as strong a risk for large, dangerous tornadoes today and tonight. 

The risk is so great that tornado shelters are opening for people in Mississippi and Alabama today.  The governor of Alabama has already declared a state of emergency ahead of the storms. This move activates emergency response centers, among other things. 

A number of school districts have either shut down classes for the day or will have early dismissals.  They don't want kids in vulnerable schools, or worse out on the highway in school buses, during tornadoes.

People are also being urged to have bicycle or motorcycle helmets in their safe spaces to wear if debris falls during a tornado.  It's also helpful to have an air horn with  you.  If you can't get out, rescuers will find you if you're blowing that horn. 

If you have friends and relatives in the South, let them know now about the risk, especially if they tend not to be weather aware. 

THE POVERTY FACTOR

As meteorologist and severe storms expert Stephen M. Strader pointed out on Twitter last evening, the highest risk of tornadoes coincides with a zone where there is a lot of poverty. Strader calls the situation "a recipe for fatalities."

Think about it. People who have money live in sturdier homes, often with basements where they can take shelter in a tornado. They have many ways to receive tornado warnings, such as weather radios, phone apps and big screen TVs. They can move temporarily into a hotel if their home is damaged. They have insurance. They have sick leave at work, so on a stormy day, they can hunker down. 

Many poor people live in flimsy structures, often mobile homes. They might not have access to weather radios  or phone apps.  The areas under the gun today and tonight in Mississippi and Alabama has some of the highest concentration of mobile homes in the nation.

People who live in mobile homes are being urged to leave now, and go to tornado shelters or to friends and relatives who live in sturdy buildings. 

However, low-wage people often aren't allowed to take time off from work, or don't get paid if they don't show up. Somebody's got to take care of the kids. They don't have the money to gas up the car and waltz into some shelter. So, they'll take their chances and stay put in their mobile homes.

There's Strader's recipe for fatalities.  This is all another excellent argument in favor of a living wage for Americans. 

MULTIFACETED DANGER

A lot of other factors make today and tonight's expected tornado outbreak dangerous. 

The storms will come in multiple waves. Mississippi is expecting three rounds of dangerous weather. Round one is early this morning, as there already is a tornado watch in effect for northern Mississippi as dawn breaks.

Another much more significant threat of powerful supercell thunderstorms with tornadoes this afternoon, and another round of powerful storms and likely tornadoes tonight. 

The forward motion of the storms today and tonight will be quick. So that means less lead time between the time warnings are issued and the moment when the tornado hits. 

Risk for more damaging tornadoes continues tomorrow,
especially for the area depicted in red

Since there will be multiple areas of dangerous storms happening all at once, who's getting hit where and who's in danger at the moment will be confusing, especially for the public who might not know which county they live in, or exactly where the warning is. 

The National Weather Service and local meteorologists do a fantastic job with warnings, but they have only so much control over how people react to the warnings. 

As I've pointed out before, when people receive tornado warnings, it's human nature to seek visual confirmation a tornado is coming.  Do you see a funnel cloud? Is there debris in the air? When you get a tornado warning, you're not supposed to go out and look for the twister. But people do.

In this weather situation, common in the South, the tornadoes are often hidden behind dense bursts of rain, so you can't see them.  There's a lot of trees and hills in the South, so that blocks the view of oncoming tornadoes, too. 

As I noted yesterday, many of the strongest tornadoes with this likely outbreak will hit well into the night, when people are sleeping.  It's harder to warn people of danger at that hour. 

The threat of significant tornadoes will continue tomorrow as the storm system heads east.  The biggest threat for those tornadoes will be in fairly heavily populated areas of the Carolinas and Georgia.

Two Disasters, Two Impoverished Areas And The Sadness Of Indifference

Beattyville, Kentucky earlier this week. Photo by
Donnie Benton.

All disasters are by definition terrible. 

Combine weather calamities with impoverished cities in areas that the media finds easy to ignore, and you have real tragedy.

Two such disasters in recent days come to mind. Neither of which you might have heard of.  

Parts of eastern Kentucky, especially around  Beattyville, a small city of about 1,300 people, were under water this week. 

An even bigger disaster is ongoing in Jackson, Mississippi, where municipal water has been in short supply or nonexistent since the mid-February freeze.  In both cases, victims of the disasters have been too much left to their own devices, with not enough help. 

BEATTYVILLE

Let's start with Kentucky. Floods are pretty common in the steep, hilly terrain of eastern Kentucky.  When it rains hard, water roars down those steep slopes much as it does here in Vermont. 

Last weekend, the rain came down especially hard, and flood water rose throughout much of Kentucky and surrounding areas. 

According to the Lexington Herald Leader:

"Beattyville, where the three forks of the Kentucky River come together, was underwater in 'major, unprecedented' flooding according to Lee County Emergency Management......Beattyville police said the water was beginning to subside on inundated Main Street early Tuesday, but several roads were still impassable."

Most of the town was under water during the peak of the flooding Monday.  Water flowed six or seven feet through the main street of town. Water entered most if not all businesses, and inundated the local ambulance building.  At least they were able to move the ambulances out of the way before the water rose.

All this was the last thing the impoverished community needed. 

As of 2019, at least 45 percent of Beattyville residents were below the poverty line.  It has been described as the poorest majority white town in the nation. 

Coal, oil and tobacco made Beattyville a prosperous town in the 19th century and a good part of the 20th.  But most of those jobs are gone.  The small city fell into poverty, and its residents hard hit by the opioid epidemic

Now, what's left of the town has been practically destroyed by a flood. Coal's not coming back. I imagine tobacco won't either. True, people could move out of Beattyville in search for better opportunities, but I'm betting most people there have neither the means nor desire to do so. 

I'm sure Beattyville and the rest of eastern Kentucky will eventually receive some disaster assistance from the federal government. They've been so beaten down by circumstances, and bad luck and life, that it'll make it harder or impossible for some residents to ever recover. 

I don't have any kind of magic want to fix all the ails Beattyville and similar impoverished towns it by disaster. But a first step is to pay attention. 

JACKSON

The plight of Jackson, Mississippi finally started getting national media attention in the past couple of days,  at least more attention than the problems in Kentucky. 

Trouble is, Jackson suffered through a dangerous water supply outage for two weeks before most of us started paying any notice.  

Jackson, a majority Black city of about 160,000, like many Southern cities, was blasted hard by the Arctic cold wave in mid-February.   

Water distribution in Jackson, Mississippi after the citys
water system failed for weeks from damage in the 
mid-February freeze and winter storms. 

The city's aging infrastructure couldn't handle temperatures that fell as low as 14 and stayed below freezing for nearly four days. 

At least 80 frozen water mains burst, and Jackson is still not very close to solving its resulting acute water shortage.

While many people in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas are still dealing with damaged homes, broken pipes and other suffering from the cold wave, those areas are more or less recovering. 

Jackson is not.  Three weeks after the freeze, one fourth of the city has no running water, notes the Associated Press.

Some of the water main breaks have been fixed, but not all of them. The city is under a boil water notice, at least in places where there's water at all. People and organizations are now donating water as a stopgap, but lugging home jugs and bottles of water for all of a household's needs range from exceedingly difficult to impossible.

Try imposing these conditions on a frail, elderly woman.  Or a family with several children. Or on people who live paycheck to paycheck on substandard wages 

It's telling, at least to me, that the worst of the water problems on the mostly south and west side of town. It's not as bad on the mostly white east and north side of Jackson, according to CNN. 

Jackson's infrastructure is old and decrepit, which is common in places that politicians and so-called leaders ignore. Tax cuts for the super wealthy seem more important than the life or death struggles of people working poverty wage jobs

The City of Jackson's Facebook page had this comment, which seems to sum up a lot of what people are thinking in Jackson, as reported by CNN:

"'They have had over three years to fix the problem what is their excuse,' wrote user Bettye Franklin. 'If this was a White city I guarantee you it would be fixed.'"

The city of Jackson wants to add another cent to the tax rate to fund the water system, but Mississippi's Republican governor would have to approve it.  He's not inclined to, because there's an unwritten rule among Republicans to never raise taxes, no matter how critical the need may be. 

SUMMARY

Major news outlets, love 'em or hate 'em, tend to focus attention and get results for places in trouble. For leaders, for the lazy, for the indifferent politicians, the media spotlight tends to get people off their duff. 

The trouble is, the immediate crisis will eventually fade, and the media spotlight will move on. Which will mean none of the problems that made these disasters worse than they had to be will be fixed. Then, in the next disaster, we'll once again be talking about these underlying factors that made things ever so much worse.

Rinse and repeat.

The United States has turned into a bit of an oligarchy. Some of our leaders do the bidding exclusively for their very wealthy donors, and not to the general population. 

These same "leaders" so often manage to get constituents to vote against their self interest through fear. They create bogeymen.  The people who want to help will turn us into the train wreck that is Venezuela, when its the "leaders" kowtowing to the billionaires that are really venezuelizing us. (There you go, I invented a word).

I'm not sure how this ends, but we as a nation have developed quite a knack for turning disasters into bigger calamities than they need to be. 

As climate change continues on, weather disasters will very likely keep getting more frequent and nasty. And more people will die and suffer needlessly. 

Yes, this post is a downer.  So do something about it.  

For what it's worth, here's what Beattyville, Kentucky looked like at the start of this week: