Hurricane Isabel? Who needed it?

Buck up, East Coasters. Some of us out here in the oft-forgotten "Flyover Country" don't quite understand all the hoopla about this storm with the pretty name.

Not to say Isabel wasn't bad; sustained winds of 100 miles per hour and massive flooding isn't a good thing by any stretch. It was a disaster, no question. But we here in the Midwest have to deal with tornadoes, which pack significantly higher winds and give us almost no warning at all. So, it was a bit hard for some of us to really get wrapped up in all this drama.

Want drama? How about funnel clouds that magically appear out of nowhere, wipe out towns, skip the next village entirely, and hopscotch recklessly across the fruited plain causing destruction at random? That's drama.

Tornadoes are nature's terrorists: they strike without warning, hitting random targets while leaving others mostly unscathed with no rhyme or reason. Yet they can be incredibly destructive when and where they choose to appear. All this makes tornadoes the scariest bad guy on the block. There's never a dull moment.

Hurricanes, on the other hand, give you plenty of warning. People were talking about Hurricane Isabel as it churned out in the Atlantic Ocean a week before it ever hit land. And, to their credit, the weather folks nailed the storm's path right on the money. Potential victims had plenty of time to leave the storm's path. Likely, anyone who got killed in the path of Isabel made a conscious choice not to leave.

Not so with tornadoes. The most warning you get with those bad boys is a siren, or maybe a screeching alert on your radio, and that's only if your lucky. Board up your windows days ahead of time? I don't think so. The only thing you get to do if a twister's coming is run to the basement, and maybe grab your dog or cat if you've got an extra second. Sometimes the only notice you get is when you go to sleep indoors, and wake up outdoors.

It's pretty funny how news reporters and folks from the Weather Channel flocked to the North Carolina coast to intentionally put themselves in harm's way as the hurricane bore down. There they were on TV, live on camera, getting blown around by hurricane force winds and trying to stay dry as the storm surge splashes them.

You wouldn't see this with a tornado. For one thing, there's no warning beforehand, so the media can't set up camp and wait. Secondly, even if they could, the first sight of an actual tornado would cause most of them to lose control of their bowels, drop the camera, and run. Thirdly, the cameramen would likely find themselves too busy dodging flying cars and debris to bother filming anything. Since the winds in a tornado are rotational, it's quite possible that the camera could get blown firmly up the cameraman's rectal cavity.

The same goes for these clowns on the coast that boarded themselves up in bars and drank their way through the storm. "Hurricane parties", they're called. They couldn't have pulled off such a thing in Pierce City, Missouri on May 4th, 2003, as the town was being plowed under by an F-3 to F-4 strength tornado.

For one thing, the partygoers wouldn't have had time to even stock the bar for the party, much less lock themselves in. Secondly, the bar would've collapsed on top of the revelers, which tends to dampen the festivities a bit. Thirdly, it's hard to do jello shots when you're ducking a stray 2x4 flying at your head at over 200 miles per hour.

The very weakest tornado, an F-1 on the Fujita scale (with winds of 73-112 miles per hour) could be stronger than Hurricane Isabel, albeit much more isolated and fast moving. An F-5, with winds from 261-318 miles per hour, could conceivably be three times as strong as Isabel and just pop in to pay you a visit unannounced.

Which would you rather have? Sustained winds for a few hours of over 100 miles per hour, but at least 24 hours to prepare and get out of Dodge? Or, a few minutes warning at best, and getting punk'd by a 300 mile per hour swirling random killer?

I'll take the hurricane, thank you very much.

Granted, so far as property damage goes, the widespread nature of hurricanes and tropical storms does give them a leg up on tornadoes.

But not as much as you may think.

The May 2003 tornado outbreak that hammered the Midwest this spring is estimated to have cost as much as 2.2 billion dollars (as many claims are still ongoing, this figure is still fluid.) Per the Georgia Insurance Information Service (GIIS) website at http://www.giis.org/disaster.htm, this catastrophe could end up comparing favorably with those caused by past hurricanes. The May tornadoes could end up being bigger than all but five hurricane or tropical storm events in entire the history of the U.S.

Also, there were 40 fatalities throughout the Midwest from the May 2003 tornado outbreak. (http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/torn/2003deadlytorn.html) Hurricane Andrew, the legendary storm which nearly bankrupted some of the biggest names in the insurance business, took 23 lives in Florida and Louisiana in comparison.

We're not even going to talk about that New Madrid Fault thing that shook so hard in 1811-1812 that it rang church bells in Boston. Or the occasional 500 year flood. Or the ice storms. Or the blizzards. Or the never-ending oppressive heat and humidity in the summertime.

So, buck up, denizens of Flyover Country. We're tougher than you think.