When I was a child and tornado watches and warnings were broadcast for our area, my mother tried to reassure my brothers and me that we needn’t worry because the geography of the Ohio Valley in West Virginia where we lived made tornadoes a rarity. The mountains along either side of the Ohio River discouraged the collision of hot and cold air masses that form tornadoes.

Those would have been comforting words if Mom hadn’t followed with a horrifying qualifier that, near as my wild imagination can recall, went something like this: “But if a tornado does form in the valley, it will be like Armageddon. The mountains will trap the funnel cloud, which will bounce off one mountain and then the other, all the way up the valley, destroying everything in sight.”

To this day, I get the chills every time a tornado watch or warning is broadcast. Not even maps like the one below from Popular Science, which shows the unlikelihood of death by tornado as opposed to natural disasters like extreme heat or cold, give me much peace of mind.