What are the odds?

There’s a lot of open space in rural Minnesota, and yet tornados struck buildings where few exist yesterday.


It wasn’t that many years ago that I was traveling in rural Minnesota and thought, “there’s no reason to pay attention to tornado warnings here. There’s nothing but land.” And that is one of the takeaways from yesterday’s tornadoes: A few feet this way or a few feet that way, and people live. The tornado ends up in a field or some woods where it can’t do any damage.

Courtesy of Google Earth, here’s proof. This is Almora, where one person died. The location is marked by the push pin.

almora.jpg

The owner of a convenience store died in Mentor:

mentor.jpg

The third person was killed in Armstrong…

armstrong.jpg

What are the odds? About 1 in 60,000, according to Live Science.