[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]

The scale and magnitude of destruction caused by yesterday’s tornadoes is almost more reminiscent of a hurricane than a typical tornado event. I hope the government officials tasked with responding to this disaster, and less importantly the national media, fully grasp this fact. Watching the incredible and horrifying videos from Tuscaloosa and elsewhere (some of which I’ve posted on my blog), I don’t know how they could miss it. But after Katrina, I never underestimate the ability of the government and media to miss the bloody obvious when it comes to grasping the scope of a natural disaster. In any event, this is unlike anything in my lifetime – the Super Outbreak of April 3, 1974, which spawned the famous Xenia, Ohio tornado, is pretty clearly the only analog in recent decades – and the aftermath will be very, very different from that of a “typical” tornado outbreak. It will require a defcon-1 level response from the authorities, and it’s the sort of thing that ought to swamp all the national media noise about insubstantial fluff issues (birth certificates, royal weddings, etc.) and spur “flood the zone” coverage for days. It’s that big of a deal.

Typically, tornadoes, although very powerful – at their worst, tornadoes’ winds easily exceed those of the strongest hurricanes – only affect a relatively small area of land, cutting a narrow path and lasting for a fairly short period of time. So while they might utterly devastate a small area, the damage they cause is limited by the relatively small amount of territory they affect. This is the fundamental difference between tornadoes and hurricanes, from a damage assessment perspective. It’s also the fundamental reason why tornadoes rarely hit cities: not because cities have some magical tornado-repelling power, but because the vast majority of this country’s land area (especially in the most tornado-prone states) is non-urban, and the odds of a powerful tornado’s small path of destruction happening to intersect with a heavily populated area are fairly low as a result.

But when you get a massive, mile-wide, EF4 or EF5 tornado that lasts for hours and impacts four states, as the Tuscaloosa/Birmingham tornado did, the math changes. And, even as long-lasting, massive, powerful tornadoes go, that one took an exceptionally terrible track. And it happened on a day where there were 100+ other tornadoes, at least several of them also huge and very powerful! Simply incredible.

The death toll should certainly be a clue to the highly unusual nature of yesterday’s disaster. I was about to write “it will almost certainly reach triple digits today,” but now I see, via Jim Cantore, that it’s already at 173, so there you go. The near-certainty of a huge, triple-digit death toll was immediately apparent to me when I saw those videos last night. I hope I’m wrong, but I bet we’ll end up in the 300s, just like the Super Outbreak. This is already, by far, the largest death toll from a U.S. tornado outbreak since that one; there hasn’t been another triple-digit death toll since then. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Tuscaloosa/Birmingham tornado ends up being the deadliest single U.S. tornado since the 1940s or 1950s.

Just an incredible, terrible disaster for the folks affected. Keep them in your thoughts and prayers today.