Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen “Twisters,” the sequel to the 1996 movie “Twister,” you may want to stop reading.
If you’re a wannabe tornado wrangler like me and you saw it during the film’s opening weekend, you may have left the theater wondering if it were really possible to “tame” a tornado.
In the updated version, the story’s main characters attempt to shoot a polyacrylate chemical mixture into a tornado’s funnel to absorb the moisture fueling it and slow it down.
Hans-Peter Plag, a professor in ’s Earth & Ocean Sciences department, said the movie presents an unrealistic solution to the problem.
“One of the things we need to understand is that tornadoes are the most powerful phenomenon we have in the atmosphere,” said Plag, who teaches a course on natural hazards and disasters.
In real life, it would take an incredible amount of the chemical used in the movie to have a real effect on destabilizing a tornado.
“The movie doesn’t serve society if they focus on something that makes very little sense,” Plag said.
Since we can’t mitigate tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and many other natural hazards, he said we should be focused on preparing for their impacts and strengthening our built environment.
“The fundamental equation that I want students to understand is the risk equation,” Plag said. “The risk we face is the probability of the hazard to happen times the fragility we have times the value of our assets that are exposed by the hazard.”
For example, he said a person in an area prone to earthquakes can reduce their risk by having their home built to withstand the shaking.
Plag said increased extreme weather events like Hurricane Beryl show us that we need to build differently for the future.
“I know houses in Grenada for example that were not touched (affected) by the hurricane because they were built solidly and others are flat,” he said. “We have to learn from that and reduce our fragility.”
In the latter half of “Twisters,” a major tornado bears down on a small town as citizens scramble into a movie theater for shelter. Thankfully, the movie’s main protagonist neutralizes the tornado with the chemical mixture just in time to save the day.
Although it would make for a less dramatic ending, Plag said the film could have educated people on the need to have tornado shelters very close by.
“There is an important role in these movies if they are made correctly and tell people a little bit about what to do and what not to do,” he said.
In that regard, Plag is a bigger fan of the original “Twister” which focused on creating a better warning system for tornadoes.