March 3, 2012: Tim Price, of Covington, replaces the American flag that flew in front of the home of JB and Cindy Hall in Crittenden before a tornado swept through the area and ripped homes - and flags - apart. / The Enquirer/ Liz Dufour
Nobody wants to talk about it, but everybody should be happy about it. Across the country, the one-year stretch from May 2012 through April 2013 saw the fewest tornadoes in six decades.
The number of deaths from the storms in that time was seven, the fewest during a 12-month stretch since 1899. And in this part of the map, the past year has been remarkably quiet.
In an average year Ohio and Indiana each record 17 tornadoes, and Kentucky has 20. But locally, for the past year, there has been nothing.
“We’ve issued some warnings, but we’ve had no confirmed landings,” said meteriologist Seth Binau of the National Weather Services’ local office. “But those things are better left not talked about.”
The exact ingredients needed for the formation of a tornado remain something of a mystery, but typical elements involve a thunderstorm bumping into already-unstable air that is spinning in different directions at different temperatures at different elevations. When air starts to rise, it acts like fingers snapping in different directions to spin a top, which forms a funnel. Once that funnel reaches the ground, it is a tornado.
On March 2, 2012, all of those ingredients were in place, spawning a devastating dozen tornadoes that rolled through Southeast Indiana, Southwest Ohio and Northern Kentucky. But since then, all has been quiet.
“We’ve had thunderstorms, of course, but the ingredients just haven’t been right. Going forward, this does not mean that we won’t have activity,” Binau said.
It would also be wrong to think things will stay calm. Nationally, May is the busiest month for tornados, so the season is just beginning. And as if on cue, as soon as this report of inactivity was published by the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Oklahoma, a series of tornadoes rolled through north-central Texas, destroying homes and killing six.
Anybody who lived through the 12 tornados here in March 2012 are fine with the lull. Kim Cook, of Piner, Ky., had not realized how quiet things have been. But she certainly did not want to press her luck by talking about it.
“Don’t say that out loud,” Cook said Thursday from her job at Piner Baptist Church. Of the all the tornadoes that day, the one in Piner ws the strongest. That particular twister was an F4 on the Fujita scale.
It touched down at 4:30 in the afternoon, tore through Grant and Kenton counties in Kentucky for 10 miles, was half a mile wide and had wind speeds of 175 miles per hour.
“It was my first tornado and I pray it will be my last,” Cook said. “I do not need another one.”