Tornados Are Us!

It was one of those brutal moments when you're reading the newspaper and see something so huge your mind can't accommodate it so it takes several seconds to register, and then you think "OK, so this has happened in my town, but no, surely it can't have come through our place." but you keep reading and it just gets worse because ... yup, that's indeed your very own neighbourhood.

Hair stands on end!

 Afterwards!

It happened this morning.

Yup, you too have probably read that Townsville was hit by tornado.  As you know, this is where we own a house. 

I dashed straight on-line to find out more, and there was a lovely e-mail from Rick saying our house is still standing.  So that's where I'm at right this moment, doing little happy-dances and joyously singing Elton John's "I'm Still Standing" at the top of my lungs.

Australia never used to have tornadoes. We used to have pretty little whirli-whirlis instead - spinning air and red dust - but then the whirli-whirlis started getting bigger and stronger until, about 12 years ago, we were out at Lady R's place in the Oz Outback when an enormous whirli-whirli swept through, ripping off the shed doors.  Jeff said "That was so close to a tornado, you mark my words, within a year, Australia will see its first real tornado."

And it was almost exactly a year later when Toowoomba farmers told the media about this concentrated horror storm sweeping through their region claiming they'd been hit by a real tornado, and there was footage of the remarkably little damage, so Australia came out with that complacent and rather ugly "dingoes don't eat babies" self-assurance - oops, sorry, make that "Australia doesn't have tornados" - and they almost turned on those poor Toowoomba farmers EXCEPT a group of Climate Change scientists turned up, looked at the damage and said "Yup, this was a real tornado." and followed that up with "We've seen this coming. It was only a matter of when and where."

Naturally I immediately rang Jeff to congratulate him on his soothsayer-ing but he had absolutely no recollection of ever having said it. Very odd, yes? 

Anyway Australia has had several tornados since, but always so remote from our lives I haven't bothered paying much attention to this particular proof of Climate Change.

But, dammit, this one has come very VERY close to home. I think perhaps the time has come to actually start to care about this Climate Change issue.