Brett Favre, and other disasters
August 19th, 2009
This past Saturday we were out on a boat on Lake Minnetonka with our friends Mitch and Amy. (Hi guys, if you’re reading! Thanks for a fun day!) The weather was cloudy and the conversation turned to storms.
One of us, probably Matt or me because we’ve had this exact same discussion ourselves several times this summer, remarked on how weird it is that tornadoes always seem to go around the Twin Cities, never right through. They always seem to hit the suburbs or small towns.
Mitch and Amy, who live out in the country, agreed with us that this was weird.
“Maybe it’s something to do with the air quality. The storms hit all that pollution around the city and they just stop.”
Because Mitch and Amy put up with their fair share of jokes from our friends about dirt roads and commuting from North Dakota, we City Mice did not get defensive about our air quality. (Also, I’m not a scientist. This theory sounded as good to me as any other.)
Then we all shrugged and went back to the awesome business of hanging out on a boat.
…..
Yeah.
A tornado touched down in Minneapolis today.
So I would just like to take this opportunity to apologize to my fellow Minneapolis residents for the hubris that brought this down upon us. Sorry about your trees and property damage.
As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I am strangely superstitious: bad things can be caused by my failure to worry about them. Claiming something is no cause for concern is basically begging the Universe to prove you wrong. Rejoicing (out loud) that we had gone X months without anyone getting sick is without a doubt the reason the kids and I have summer colds at this very moment. And now this.
While the most popular theory on Twitter this afternoon seemed to be God/the Universe/Mother Nature punishing Minnesota for bringing Brett Favre out of fake, flip-floppy retirement, I know it’s really my fault. Sorry, guys.
Earthquake, tsunami, forest fire, flash flood. Bat flu (why not?), zombies, lake pirates, alien invasion. I promise to worry about each of these before I go to bed tonight. And a new list tomorrow night. Feel free to send suggestions. Just trying to do my part to keep us all safe.
August 20th, 2009 at 5:02 am
I think big structures like buildings, skyscrapers, and congestion (or mountain ranges) – which impede air flow to feed the tornado and therefore disallow it to touch the ground – might help explain why tornadoes hit non-cities and trailer parks (and are confined mostly to the midwest). I like the air quality idea…but the filthiest air on the planet likely surrounds a trailer park and they get hit all the time.
August 20th, 2009 at 10:23 am
What gets lost, too, whenever this comes up, is that there is a lot more country out there than city, so percentage wise, better chance of missing highly populated area.
I realize this is no consolation to those in Kentucky, Arkansas, etc, who have their towns destroyed every year.
August 20th, 2009 at 10:40 am
It doesn’t help matters when said trailer parks are often located in a zone called Tornado Alley. It’s the same kind of foresight that leads to million dollar homes being built on stilts on hillsides in parts of California prone to earthquakes and mudslides.
August 21st, 2009 at 9:20 am
Something similar happened to us a couple of years ago. Our oldest Emily was terrified of storms because she was afraid of tornadoes. We had a bad storm that one Thursday(i think it was Thursday) in September. We all went down into the basement because of the hail. In an effort to calm her down, I told her that I didn’t even know anyone who had been in a tornado. Her mom also didn’t know anyone who had been in a tornado. Two days later over 200 homes (including ours) in Rogers were damaged by a tornado, and one girl who was the same age as her was killed.