Lexly Black still remembers the night in 1992 when her house near Bundaberg in southern Queensland was ripped apart by one of Australia’s strongest tornadoes. The F4-5 tornado that swept through Bucca destroyed nine homes in 10 minutes.

“The cat was sleeping on the washing machine. We didn’t see her again,” Ms Black said. “The dog was obviously sucked up and blown away. He came back the next morning with a broken jaw.”

This was one of two tornadoes spawned by severe storms over south-east Queensland that day. Five catamarans were capsized at Maroochydore, beach swimmers were rescued, cattle were lost and golf-ball-size hail damaged homes and stopped the cricket at the Gabba.

The Bundaberg region features regularly in tornado stories. In 2013 the nearby coastal township of Bargara was ripped apart by one of these vicious swirling systems.

Earlier this month, Bundaberg residents lost roofs when another twister hit the city.

Is the Wide Bay Queensland’s tornado alley?

Certainly some of the storms hitting the region have been swift and ferocious in the impact.

Mrs Black said minutes before the 1992 tornado, there was no hint of the danger ahead. “When it struck, it just seemed like it was going to be a normal storm,” she said. “We shut up the house, put the dog in the garage, and next thing there was no house it just happened so quickly there was no time to be frightened.” She said she and her husband were lucky to escape with their lives. “I was walking down the hallway, bricks started to fall and I put my head in the hall cupboard,” Ms Black said. “My husband threw himself into the lounge chair and just sort of curled up. “A piece of roof truss went into the arm of the chair and missed him by a couple of centimetres. It was like a freight train coming through.”

In Queensland, tornados form in outbreaks of widespread severe storms, as well as in tropical systems such as cyclones. Bundaberg is in the firing line for both of those types of weather. “Up around the Bundaberg area we have seen a fairly significant number of tornado reports over the last few decades,” Mr Wedd said.

“Tornadoes in the US tend to be stronger than the ones we get here simply because their atmospheric characteristics are much more favourable over there,” he said. “They get warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico that penetrates inland and that meets very cold dry air that has had to pass over the Rockies.”

But Bundaberg is not the only place in southern Queensland to experience tornadoes. The south-east coast forecast region has actually recorded more tornadoes than the Wide Bay, which is equal second with the Darling Downs.

- ABC

Heads up MV and PWM!

Still not as bad as England.

• Still not as bad as England.

Is the response to many, many things…

Uh-oh. I’ll keep a watch out this arvo.

Eastern New England (NSW) gets quite a few, too. I saw the aftermath of a big tornado near Walcha many years ago. Pretty amazing damage, including a house completely smashed to smithereens and redistributed over a 4 km X 300m area, and very large eucalypts twisted off at or just below ground level. And sheets of corrugated iron wrapped around rural fencing, in and out and back again, several times.

furious said:

• Still not as bad as England.

Is the response to many, many things…

LOL

I came to the conclusion a decade or so ago that there’s hardly a country in the world that hasn’t at some time claimed to be the tornado capital of the world.

The Australian outback for example has some massive tornados, and the only reason we don’t hear much about them is because the population density is so low.

I’ve been in an F1 tornado that hit CSIRO and Monash Uni in Melbourne, the wind damage was noted in the press but they never published that it was a tornado. It was only because I went out and measured the direction in which trees had fallen – in opposite directions along the opposite edges of the damage zone and parallel to the track at the edges – that I could be absolutely sure that it was a tornado and not a microburst.

I’ve also seen a tornado off the Wollongong coast that never made it into the newspapers. No damage.

“England”, which was the answer given by QI, is false, the only tornados that QI mentioned there were F1 tornados. It definitely is not a rival for the US tornado alley.

My main conclusion is that all you need for destructive tornados is flat land and thermal convection – there doesn’t have to be a shear wind coming off the Rocky Mountains to create them.

I strongly suspect that eastern China is as plagued by tornados as Tornado Alley. But other more serious disasters in those places take their News’s attention away from tornados.