Something Resembling Fire Tornado Terrifies Redding, California

Photo grab of an intense tornado-like fire whirl in Redding
California this week 

Yesterday, I wrote about the terrifying wildfire that ripped through Redding, California and surrounding communities, killing two people.

ABC10 now gives us an even more scary video of the fire.  The intense blaze caused a tornado-like vortex that made things even more unreal. The video is at the bottom of this post.

Big wildfires, with their intense updrafts, can create their own thunderstorms (Pyrocumulus is the name of the thunderstorm clouds that form in the updrafts over wildfires.)  These pyrocumulus thunderstorms, or whatever you want to call them, create erratic winds, that can get incredibly strong.

Sometimes, rotations set up that are as bad as tornadoes. In rare cases the wildfires and the thunderstorms they cause create actual tornadoes. I'm not sure, but this might have been the case with the Redding fire.

The rotation you see in the video below does look tornado-like. 3-D radar images indicate strong rotation extending three miles above the surface in this firestorm, which is kind of tornadic if you ask me. And television station KCRA reported on one Redding neighborhood in which some houses didn't burn, but were badly damaged by winds from what residents said was a fire tornado. Click on this link for that video. 

In Australia, a bonafide fire tornado - a real tornado caused by a thunderstorm which in turn was caused by a wildfire, was documented in 2003.

Most fire whirls you see on the news - rotating columns of smoke and fire - are akin to dust devils but are not true tornadoes. However, I'm beginning to suspect - though I'm not a scientist - that what hit Redding might well have been a real fire tornado.

If it wasn't, it was an unusually intense ground based whirl created by the fire, as the Mercury News points out. 

Here's the video of the maybe fire tornado in Redding. Whatever it is, it was sure scary. Turn up the volume to hear what it sounded like. (Spoiler: Like the freight train when a regular tornado is coming.)



In this video, taken in Mati, Greece this week during the big wildfires there, show how the fires whip up incredible winds as they bear down. The guy taking the film accidentally locked himself out of the house when trying to let his cat in as the fire approached. The guy and the cat miraculously survived: