On August 18, a tornado lifted up a tent with three children inside and hurled it 9m (30ft) across a campsite at Great Langdale Valley, near Ambleside, Lake District. The children were rushed to hospital
but later released with cuts and bruises. Their parents, Steve and Gail Gardner, had ventured out of the tent at 7am after a stormy night and were about to make a cup of tea. “A line of trees were going crazy as if in a storm, but everything else around it was perfectly still,” Mrs Gardner said. “It looked like a tornado. The next thing I knew it just picked up the tent” (News, Sept 2).
People swept up in tornados is much more common in the US. In a scene reminiscent of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, a teenager was in his family trailer caravan home near Fordland, Missouri, in March 2006 when he heard what sounded like jet aircraft approaching.
“I looked at my grandma in the kitchen, and the walls were moving, the roof was moving,” he said. “I could feel the whole trailer tipping over.” The caravan was struck by a tornado with winds estimated at about 240kmh (150mph). The teenager was hurled over a barbed wire fence and dropped on soft grass in a field, and apart from a gash to his head that needed five stitches, he was left only dazed and shaken. It was later calculated that he had been thrown 398m (1,307ft), which may be a record for the longest distance travelled by anyone picked up by a tornado and who survived.
There are many other remarkable survival stories of people flung through the air by tornados. In February 2008, an 11-month old baby was thrown some 100 metres (330ft) by a tornado in Tennessee and landed near a post office with only minor bruising. And in 1955, a retired railway worker, Fred Dye, was sucked out of his house in Udall, Kansas, and, quite literally, out of his shoes. He was dropped uninjured into a tree where he sat out the rest of the storm.