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Peak Midwestern proposal
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
460 points (96.4% liked)
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Ever been right near a freight train crossing as one blazes by at high speed?
Imagine ten or twenty at the same time.
Tornadoes are incredibly loud, and just... sound like destruction... the ground, the air....everything is shaking, rippling, like bombs going off continuously.
It is difficult to capture this with video or audio, because... they are so loud, and hit so many frequency ranges, that you'd basically have to be sitting inside of an arena concert subwoofer to... get the audio experience replicated.
That and... basically everything fairly close to them has a tendency to be obliterated.
They can rip a telephone pole (basically shaved down tree trunks in areas of America tornadoes often hit) out of the ground, and then throw it through a house, like, clean through, and then clean through the next house, and then embedded 5 to 10 feet into the ground, at an oblique angle.
Tornadoes move around fairly quickly, and ... basically everything that gets too close is... blenderized.
If you're within say 500 meters of one, you should either be hiding in a cellar or bunker, or you should be driving away from it as fast as possible.
Notice how this tree... is nowhere near where it got uprooted from.
This tree managed to get broken off, thrown just so that it landed upright, braced against a power line.
Nearly 2 metric ton vehicle thrown about a kilometer through the air, hit the town water tower, bounced off, kept going for another ~ half kilometer.
...
Please do not walk up to a tornado.
maybe if it's a baby tornado 🥺 please, i wanna pet one, they look so funny :3
Hah, well, there are basically much, much smaller scale 'tornadoes' that we call 'dust devils', or other terms... they're usually only the size of about a person, maybe as tall as two people, they're formed by other kinds of climate/weather conditions, and tend to dissapate in under a minute.
You could probably 'pet' one of those, though you may lose your hat, 'get your feathers ruffled', so to say.
spectral, you're such a nice person :) i always notice you :D
Right back at you, you are always pleasant and reasonable as well, and your username sticks out with the _ underscores, haha!
=D
What a wholesome interaction 😃
You want a "Dust Devil," they are kinda baby tornados that exist in the US south west. Maybe wait a few years to visit though. The tornados are currently one of the least dangerous things about visiting.
I was terrified of these when I was little, but fortunately they’re not that common in Yorkshire. I made the decision to focus my worry on the Bermuda Triangle instead.
That's how they get you. You're occupied thinking about Bermuda Triangle and walk right into quicksand!
How's life in a ditch
That is a fantastic description of the sound/feeling of a close tornado. It really is like a freight train turned up to 11 with added constant groaning explosions.
I've not personally encountered a tornado that close, but I've personally met and talked to some old timers from the Plains States... who've actually got personal experience of having to hide in the cellar while a tornado barely misses their house by 1000 feet.
The freight train / constant bombs going off descriptions come from them, and I find them pretty reasonably good analogies, with myself having a bit of experience with audio engineering for video game mods, looked into some of the physics of sound to tweak things around.
You could maybe replicate parts of the sound element with... basically a massive subwoofer that literally registers on the Richter scale... but another element that can't really be replicated is the massive and rapid changes in ambient air pressure very close to a tornado... that changes the properties of how sound propagates... and there is such a high magnitude/volume, low frequency nature of all of it that... its where 'hearing' and 'feeling' blend into the same thing.
Dixie Alley, been around quite a few. Had a big one pass over and then touch down a quarter mile from the house once. You could feel the roof lifting. It's so fucken loud.
If we really wanted to reduced damage from tornadoes, we would build decoy trailer parks with lots of telephone poles all over. House trailers are a tornado's natural prey.
hahah that deserves some price ;)
Yeah... that sounds (hah) just completely terrifying.
I've been in a few very high high speed, sustained windstorms, over in the PNW, but nothing approaching an actual tornado.
I'md glad you find the metaphor apt!
As to decoy trailer parks... lol.
That would at least be a better usage of FEMA funds than concentration camps for farmer / field workers...