Disaster! Or not?

So Phanee wants us to talk about natural disasters. This is kind of convenient, since I live in the middle-ish of Tornado Alley. Actually, not so convenient - my oldest recurring nightmare is of being stuck outside during a tornado and not being able to get away (inevitably while I was on a picnic with my grandparents... go figure!).

For the most part, my area isn't particularly known for natural disasters. There are no mountains to be volcanoes, it's a swamp so wildfires are unheard of, and we're too far from the coast to get hurricanes (though we do get the leftover rain, which makes getting anywhere without swimming through puddles rather difficult). We get the occasional earthquake rattle, but only from earthquakes that have focal points several hundred miles away - most of the time nobody notices until they mention it on the news. Even true blizzards are rare, though more common than the rest of that stuff. I'm pretty sure the last real blizzard on record was in like 1972 or something. But what we do have a lot of are tornadoes.

Basically, for those who don't know, what happens to form a tornado is the upper level of clouds in a thunderstorm begin swirling due to updrafts and crossed wind currents, and well, a bunch of technical stuff. Anyway, when the wind shear gets to a certain point, the clouds begin to form a funnel. If the funnel actually touches the ground, then it's considered a tornado.

Now, I personally have not been near a tornado. There have been several, some pretty devastating, in the areas around us, but they never got close enough to be really threatening. But, just about every thunderstorm we have in the summer, the weather forecasters get out their fancy-dancy shear detectors and show us exactly where each tornado COULD happen. In all honestly maybe 1 in every hundred touches down, but each storm there seems to be at least 5 potential points where we could MAYBE have a natural disaster.

My life sounds so tame, doesn't it?