Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 21, 1994 TAG: 9409270016
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's as inevitable as a change in the weather. Wherever a tornado rips through an inhabited area, a survivor will try to describe the phenomenon on a human scale, in some way that will make the sheer power comprehensible to people who didn't live through it. Almost always, the roar of a tornado is likened to the din of a freight train - rolling over you at top speed, one imagines.
It does sound like a freight train, one stunned resident said after a tornado touched down last week in the Martinsville area, where an estimated $10 million damage was done to 59 homes and 13 businesses in a matter of minutes. It was the last of eight tornadoes that the remnants of Tropical Storm Beryl spun across North Carolina and over the state line into Virginia's Piedmont.
Seeing photographs of the brick walls reduced to rubble, the crushed car under the overturned camper, the toppled trees snapped off like toothpicks, one message is clear: Oh, how lucky we were this time.
The terror felt by those who were in the path of the storm system, or the losses to those whose property was damaged, shouldn't be minimized. Tornadoes are the most destructive of all atmospheric phenomena, their devastating impact limited by their localized nature - they usually will destroy everything in their path, but that path is narrow. Those facing the daunting and depressing job of cleaning up where one has touched down surely need all the sympathy and help they can find.
But beneath the mind-numbing confusion of a world tossed about like a fruit salad, there is relief that, in this case, there were no deaths or serious injuries. This is brought poignantly and forcibly to mind by the fact that Beryl's little kickup occurred 25 years - almost to the day - of the horrifying floods that swept Virginia after Hurricane Camille came ashore and moved inland, setting up a weather pattern that, by unofficial measures, dumped 31 inches of rain on Nelson County in six hours.
Water roared off the mountains and out of river channels in the middle of the night, carrying with it trees and boulders, mountainsides of mud, and sweeping away families as they slept in their homes. Statewide, 152 people died, most of them in Nelson County. Some disappeared without a trace. It was a natural disaster on a scale Virginia had never seen before, and has not since.
Was nature more merciful on Aug. 17, 1994, than on Aug. 19, 1969? No. Nature shows neither mercy nor wrath, but only indifference to the living creatures that depend on it, that survive or die by circumstances either random or well beyond the control of human beings. It is such awesome indifference that brings people together in community, mutually dependent despite their relatively puny disputes.
When the power of nature is so overwhelming that it easily sweeps aside every defense raised to ensure survival, it can remind us of nothing so much as the slender grace by which we live. And surveying piles of rubble, shaken but alive, we can feel lucky.
by CNB