As Perils, Twisters Don’t Get Fair Shake

Any Midwesterner who ever moved to California has heard the same thing, in so many words, from friends left behind: “Aren’t you afraid of an earthquake?”

I wonder whether any Californian who’s relocated to the Midwest ever heard anyone say, “Watch out for those tornadoes.”

Parts of the Midwest were battered and then whooshed away in recent days, as a series of twisters ran through Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and Tennessee and then headed farther south. By Tuesday, the death count was around 40.

A transplanted Nebraskan, I’ve walked, almost disbelieving, among the ruins of a twister’s path. Even all these years later and from so far away, I feel a kinship with those in the tornado-stricken towns.

And it got me to wondering why Midwesterners fret about earthquakes when they’ve got Mother Nature’s baddest boy right in their own backyard.

A U.S. government Web site indicates that about 200 people have died in California earthquakes since 1960, almost all in three big quakes. Another government site notes that, on average, tornadoes kill 80 people a year in the United States, meaning that since 1960 about 3,400 have died in tornadoes.

It’s hard to argue we’re in greater danger in California than in the Midwest or South.

The Midwesterner’s fascination with quakes, I suspect, comes from the nature of the beast. A tornado you see coming. But Midwesterners are more accustomed to bluff than the real thing, because tornado warnings often result only in big thunderstorms.

An earthquake you don’t see coming. Nobody warns you. And unlike tornado warnings that melt away, an earthquake always gives you some kind of a performance -- even if it’s one that just rattles your teacups. But even as your cups are shaking, you don’t know if in the next instant it’ll be your walls.

To Midwesterners who grow up with the “cry wolf” syndrome for tornadoes, an earthquake’s sudden arrival is both frightful and perversely unique.

David Max lives in Irvine but grew up in Nebraska and Iowa. He was a high schooler working at an A&W; root beer stand in Shenandoah, Iowa, when he saw his first twister. “We could see it out the big glass window,” he recalls, “but it was two or three miles outside of town.” A truck driver decided to ignore the tornado warning and headed south for Kansas City, anyway. He was killed in the tornado, Max says.

Max came to Orange County in 1975 with a healthy respect for tornadoes but, mindful of the mostly false alarms of the Midwest, didn’t live in fear of them.

“You didn’t give [tornadoes] that much credibility, because you didn’t think it was going to happen,” he says. “There were always a lot of thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches. As a young boy, that meant you couldn’t go out and play. It was almost like a restrictive thing.”

Then, early in his California life, Max, now 51, faced the beast. He and his wife were eating lunch on the second floor of a restaurant near John Wayne Airport. “The first thing that happened,” Max says, “a lot of the glasses in the kitchen were rattling and falling off onto the tile floor in the kitchen.” He thought the busboys were just having a bad day. “Then the chandeliers started shaking back and forth.”

He ran over to a pillar, prepared to hang on for dear life. Everyone else had remained seated. “I was trying to protect myself,” he says.

That’s how Californians earn their spurs, I guess.

Max says he has Midwestern friends who want to earn theirs. “It’s almost like an inside joke,” he says. “They say they want to get in on one, to experience that feeling. They want to be in on a temblor that lasts 30 seconds and then goes away.”*

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.