Tornado swarm called ‘uncharted territory’ for U.S.
CELINA, Ohio — The tornado screeching across southern Ohio on Monday night triggered a cellphone alert that roused Rich Schlarman. He ignored it. Then came another. That was enough to persuade him to hurry his 83-year-old mother toward the basement.
“We only made it down about four steps when I heard a loud boom,” Schlarman said. “If we hadn’t made it down as far as we had, we would probably not have made it.”
On Tuesday, his home was a shambles: walls bent, doors tilted, the roof gone — another house crippled amid a stretch of severe weather that has tormented communities from the Rocky Mountains to the Mid-Atlantic in recent weeks.
Now the severe weather had come to Celina, a city of about 10,000 people about 60 miles northwest of Dayton, causing the kind of devastation that has left state after state with ruined buildings and grieving families this spring.
In the last week alone, authorities have linked tornadoes to at least seven deaths and scores of injuries. Federal government weather forecasters logged preliminary reports of more than 500 tornadoes in a 30-day period — a rare figure, if the reports are ultimately verified — after the start of the year proved mercifully quiet.
The barrage continued Tuesday night, as towns and cities across the Midwest took shelter from powerful storms. Tornadoes carved a line of devastation from eastern Kansas through Missouri, ripping trees and power lines in Lawrence, Kansas, southwest of Kansas City, and pulverizing houses in nearby Linwood. Several injuries were reported.
On the East Coast, tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings were issued in parts of northern New Jersey and on Staten Island in New York.
“From mid-April on, it’s just been on a tear,” said Patrick Marsh, the warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. “What has really set us apart has been the last 10 days or so. The last 10 days took us from about normal to well above normal.”
Tuesday, Marsh said, was the 12th consecutive day with at least eight tornado reports, breaking the record. The storms have drawn their fuel from two sources: a highpressure area that pulled the Gulf of Mexico’s warm, moist air into the central United States, where it combined with the effects of a trough trapped over the Rockies, which included strong winds.
“We are flirting in uncharted territory,” Marsh said of the sustained period of severe weather. “Typically, you’d see a break of a day or two in between these long stretches, but we’re just not getting that right now.”
Forecasters said that even the briefest of reprieves might not come until late this week, and another round of severe weather erupted Tuesday afternoon.
Climate change is increasingly linked to extreme weather, but limited historical information, especially when compared with temperature data that goes back more than a century, has made it difficult for researchers to determine whether rising temperatures are making tornadoes more common and severe.
Dire warnings and frantic rushes to safety have taken place across the country in recent weeks, and the nation’s tornado death toll has reached its highest level since 2014. So far this year, tornadoes have been blamed for at least 38 deaths in the United States, including this week’s fatality in Celina.