It has been brought home to us in recent days that the problems faced by Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz were not unique. Dorothy, you may recall lived "in the midst of the great Kansas prairies with her Uncle Henry". Their home was therefore right in the middle of "Tornado Alley", the flat area of the mid-west of the US stretching from Texas through Oklahoma and Kansas up to Illinois, so badly devastated earlier this week.
Dorothy's predicament might well have served as a commentary to television film of the mayhem: "The house whirled around two or three times and rose slowly through the air. The north and south winds met where the house stood, and made it the exact centre of the cyclone. In the middle of a cyclone the air is generally still, but the great pressure of the wind on every side of the house raised it up higher and higher, until it was at the very top of the cyclone; and there it remained and was carried miles and miles away as easily as you could carry a feather," - except, of course, that the phenomenon was a probably a tornado rather than a cyclone.
Tornadoes also occur in Ireland every now and then. They are comparatively rare, probably fewer than 10 a year, and Irish tornadoes, moreover, are considerably less vicious than their continental or transatlantic cousins, and not, as a general rule, life-threatening. But they leave a substantial trail of damage, nonetheless.
One of the most noteworthy instances was on August 8th, 1967, at Killeagh in Co Cork. The tornado developed at 4.30 a.m. and in the course of its brief destructive life it carved a swathe of havoc 300 feet wide along a five-mile track between the neighbouring villages of Killeagh and Curraheen. Ricks of hay were lifted into the air and scattered over a wide area, slates were ripped from houses and trees in its path were felled or stripped of foliage.
A similar event occurred near Ballyhaunis in November, 1977. A swirling funnel, 30 feet in diameter, formed around 10.45 a.m, and the damage was the same familiar litany.
And in Youghal, Co Cork, in early 1995, a tornado formed on the seafront about 7 a.m. during a hailstorm, whence it passed through a caravan site, and then proceeded down the main street. "It seemed to suck in the caravans," a witness said, "lifting them up, twisting them around, and flinging some of them across the road" - which almost brings us back again to the little party on the Yellow Brick Road en route to Oz.