Tornadoes, strong atmospheric vortices, are a very formidable natural phenomenon. A tornado acts like a giant air pump. Vortex air currents rise at a speed of 80–100 kilometers per hour and carry away (“suck”) everything that gets in the way - stones, trees, buildings, water, animals, people.
Near 1460, almost all the annals record an extraordinary storm in Moscow. It is noted in them that at first there were clouds over Moscow from the south to the east, where they joined and collected, "like a fur", "sea waters." Then the formidable and "great velma" cloud began "its march from east to west." Lightning struck, and rain fell "on the hail of Moscow, on many villages and places far from the hail." Whirlwinds swept over the ground, a wind of extraordinary strength demolished many choirs and churches, broke many houses and many "firmly fortified human buildings to smash".
The storm broke many trees, "some of them broke the top, others up to half, others up to a third and at the very root." Many ancient "great oaks" were uprooted from the ground.
And in the summer days of 1904, a tornado swept over Moscow, which then caused many troubles. Before the appearance of this tornado, a kind of oppressive situation was established in nature: it was warm and very stuffy. And on July 29, heavy lead clouds began to slowly approach the city, floating from the southeast. They rushed to the sound of thunder and uprooted perennial trees, upturned huge stones, tore, as if they were sheets and blades, iron roofs from houses, heavy signboards, turned telegraph and telephone poles into chips and destroyed entire buildings.
Suddenly a clearly outlined trunk descended from the cloud to the ground - a giant funnel, outwardly similar to a column of smoke rising from a conflagration. One of the fire brigades (Lefortovo) rushed to the site of the alleged fire, but something unimaginable happened here. The enraged tornado seemed to be waiting for this. An invisible force flew like a kite to the firemen, spun, spun the carts, picked them up and lifted them up into the sky with the horses, destroying barrels on the fly. Nearby, people, cows, fences, rooftops, police booths swept through the air, as on a giant merry-go-round …
The magazine “Niva”, which was published at that time, noted that “the areas of Lefortovo, Sokolniki, Basmannaya and Yauzskaya parts were especially damaged. In Lefortovo, a lot of buildings were destroyed, people and cattle were wounded and killed … The vast Annogofskaya grove was all destroyed and scattered with chips around the neighborhood, and there were individual trees up to one meter thick in it."
After this terrible tornado, a 40-kilometer trail of destruction was left in a strip from ten to seven hundred meters wide.
Not without funny cases. So, for example, in the German market, a tornado picked up a policeman who was at his post and lifted him into the air. Soaring high up in full form, the policeman shouted heart-rendingly and called for help. Soon he was thrown to the ground naked but alive. Subsequently, the policeman said that during the "flight" he was painfully beaten with hail.
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At the railway crossing, the tornado played a cruel joke with the switchman. Having missed the train, the switchman entered the booth and immediately felt how she jumped off the spot, rose into the air and rushed to the side. Having flown several tens of meters, the booth fell on the pavement and split. The switchman survived, but was very frightened.
And one little girl was carried by a whirlwind through the whole city. She sank somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow, alive and well, and even without a single scratch.
According to eyewitnesses, where the tornado crossed the Moskva River, the bottom was completely exposed - the water was sucked in by a funnel.
However, it was not yet the most powerful tornado in our country. Relatively recently, on June 9, 1984, the same lead cloud with a trunk appeared in the area of the city of Ivanov. He squirmed and swayed as he walked. The tornado hummed like a jet plane, often the hum turned into a whistle. In the depths of the funnel-shaped column, deaf explosions were heard. Everything that was inside the air whirlpool seemed to boil and even glow.
Several "daughter" funnels periodically appeared near the main trunk. It was they who became the main sources of destruction. And the damage was colossal. In the course of the tornado's movement, a zone of continuous destruction was formed. The roofs of houses and even entirely small houses flew into the air. Trees were twisted by their roots, power lines collapsed, buses, cars, trolleybuses were lifted into the air, railway cars were overturned. A 50-ton tank was torn off the water tower and thrown as much as twelve meters.
The tornado passed through the entire Ivanovo, Tver, Kostroma, Yaroslavl and Moscow regions. It was accompanied by heavy hail, some hailstones weighed up to a kilogram, and their diameter reached fifteen centimeters. In some places, the layer of hail that fell out exceeded three centimeters.
The inhabitants of Europe also suffer disasters from tornadoes a lot (here tornadoes are called blood clots). In 1930, in the Rhine Mountains (Germany), five human bodies covered with a thick crust of ice fell to the ground from a thundercloud. At first, it was assumed that these were glider pilots who were dragged into the upper atmosphere by an air stream. But this assumption was subsequently not confirmed, and gliders were never found. Then it turned out that the people were killed by a tornado that arose in the mountains and turned the sarcophagi of its victims into a kind of "super-city".
Another tornado, which also happened in Germany, went down in the history of the country as the most deadly in recent centuries. At the beginning of May 1952, in the region of the city of Göttingen, there was an unusually exhausting heat for these places. Then, unexpectedly, clouds came up, and a strong thunderstorm broke out. It was then that this terrible blood clot arose.
Heading towards the Harz mountain range, he, like a giant air "knife", drew two furrows on the ground thirteen and sixteen kilometers long.
On its way, the tornado knocked down 56 thousand trees and destroyed many buildings. The vortex rotation speed reached 200 kilometers per hour. A mighty force broke centuries-old trees as if they were ordinary matches. Having absorbed dust, sand, stones, fragments of trees and buildings, he scattered all this mass on his way. The area where this destructive blood clot passed through had the appearance of a semi-desert for a long time.
HUNDRED GREAT DISASTERS. N. A. Ionina, M. N. Kubeev
