By Scott Buttram
The second anniversary of the April 27 tornados that ravaged the state has just passed. The rebuilding is still underway in Clay and Trussville neighborhoods from the January tornados just over a year ago.
With those reminders, it will come as no surprise that Weather.com has listed three Alabama cities among their top five tornado cities in the United States. No state had as many cities listed as Alabama.
Topping the list was Huntsville, followed by Jackson, MS; Birmingham; Tuscaloosa; and Little Rock, AR.
“Now we’re becoming more aware of how tornado prone the Gulf Coast states are, especially from the Mississippi River east,” tornado expert Dr. Greg Forbes said.
In regard to Birmingham, the story reminded readers of that a “massive EF-4 multi-vortex tornado ripped across the region” in April of 2011.
The path of that storm was as wide as 1.5 miles in areas of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa and tossed train cars around like a child’s toy.
According to the story, Forbes tracks and monitors tornadoes year-round for The Weather Channel and weather.com. Dr. Forbes is a foremost expert in his field, studying under Tetsuya Fujita, who developed the F-rating scale by which we classify tornadoes.
Dr
. Forbes has developed a list this year of the Top Tornado Cities. This list shows the cities where homes are most likely to get hit by a tornado, the story said.
“The difference between this year’s list and the ones in the past is the past ones were just counting the sheer number of tornadoes,” Forbes told weather.com. “That didn’t take into consideration the track length or path width. Thus it didn’t count how big of an area was being affected by the tornadoes.”
Alabama placed more cities in the top ten and any other single state.
Rounding out the cities listed were Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Atlanta, Wichita, and Nashville.
Photo by MetroCreative
