Tornado FOOTAGE – Once In A LIFETIME

The Midwest is still in the thick of tornado season, and nowhere is this more true than in Tornado Alley—a vast swath of geography stretching from the Great Lakes in the North to the Gulf of Mexico in the south, bounded on the east by the Appalachian and Ozark foothills and on the West by the rising geography at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. In this stormy area, cold air fronts sweep down from the arctic while warm air fronts well up from the Gulf, creating thunderstorms and vortices when they collide.

When they collide with sufficient force, tornadoes form.

The largest city in Tornado Alley is Chicago, which sits at the junction of the American Midwest’s river system and the Great Lakes. While it isn’t called the “windy city” for nothing, it doesn’t usually play host to titanic twisters.

But on Monday, July 15, a particularly spectacular tornado came out to play in the Chicago metro area, tearing up the landscape and giving a special vista to travelers trapped at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, as all flights were grounded while air traffic controllers waited for the storm to pass. The twister got so close at one point that the control tower was evacuated. Passengers who’d already been loaded into planes were not so lucky, as they had to nervously weather the storm sitting on the tarmac in aluminum tubes that are designed to be pushed around by air currents.

Cell phone video taken by passengers parked on the runway made its way online. The footage shows horizontal rain as the airplane rocks side to side in the tempestuous winds, with lightning flashing all about the dark and swollen skies.

All told, over sixty flights were canceled outright due to the storm, while another four-hundred were delayed during the extended weather-related service outage.

The National Weather Service identified the storm as belonging to a complex of storms plaguing the area, with winds in excess of eighty miles per hour.