>We get them in close (within a mile or 2) every year.
>
>I used to live in Florida - we'd see tornados there once in a while but they were small - not like some of the 1/2 mile wide town destroyers they get out here.

Last Sunday of this April we had a nice one zigzagging through the area in an incredible hit-and-miss pattern. You can measure how serious it was when you hear that we watched about five hours of completely ad-free TV. A building would be waiting for empty matchboxes to get packed into, while there were flowers in pots hanging from the window just across the street, not a petal missing. Or there's a dozen houses completely ground to the ground, just a wide trace of tinder in a straight line leading to the school - then there's the school, intact. Then the house just behind the school reduced to toothpicks.

>Most of the land here is a type of clay (this all used to be river or sea (yes - sea) bottom thousands of years ago). Basements tend to get squeezed as the land flows around them. We've spent a few thousand $$ just a couple of years ago to fix cracking walls.
>
>Ah well, at least land is cheap.

And achieves good mileage ;).