Was The Oklahoma City Tornado The Worst In History?
Oklahoma City Tornado bschjoth A disaster by the numbers. Monday's tornado in the Oklahoma City area killed at least 24 people and leveled a massive number of homes and businesses. The L.A. Times quoted weather officials as saying the twister "was at least in the same league" as the harrowing tornado that struck the same area in 1999, while one local meteorologist called it "the worst tornado in the history of the world." There's no single measurement that totally describes the destructive force of a tornado, but there are several ways to get a sense of the impact. THE ENHANCED FUJITA SCALE This scale, employed since 2007 in the U.S. as a measure of damage that a tornado causes, rates destruction from zero to five: crews survey the damage, then assign the tornado an estimated wind speed based on that damage. There's a long list of how to quantify the damage: uprooted trees...