Mysterious Island: Twister

Once upon a midnight dreary (actually it was about 11 p.m.), I was wrapping up a night’s work in the projection room of the historic Avalon Theatre where I work as a projectionist.

Back in the days when we still showed two movies a night, this job would often see me shutting down and closing up late in the evening or even in the wee hours of the morning.

Once upon a midnight dreary (actually it was about 11 p.m.), I was wrapping up a night’s work in the projection room of the historic Avalon Theatre where I work as a projectionist.

Back in the days when we still showed two movies a night, this job would often see me shutting down and closing up late in the evening or even in the wee hours of the morning.

On this particular night, I was waiting for the projector lamp to cool down as usual before closing the joint up when suddenly my tinny A.M. radio began making that annoying squawk that lets listeners know the good people at the Emergency Broadcast System have something to tell them.

I listened intently as the computerized voice told me that a tornado was bearing down on Avalon Canyon at that very moment and that its “imminent” trajectory was going to take it directly over Avalon.

There, within the two-foot thick concrete walls of the Casino, I reckoned I was in just about the best place in Avalon I could be under the circumstances.

Over the next few minutes, there were no power outages, nor flickering of lights in the Casino, nor anything else to tell me something terrible was going on outside.

So when I felt it was safe to do, I gathered the gumption and left the confines of the projection room.  Looking out one of the windows of the building’s east wing, I saw the lights of an Avalon that was obviously still intact.

Since this event happened in the midst of an ongoing windstorm, most Avalon residents were apparently oblivious to the late night visitor.  But a number of stories were circulating the next day, including one from a friend of mine who lived on a  boat in the harbor.

Right about the time that the beast was passing over Avalon, he was awakened by that characteristic “freight train” roar and a violent rocking of his 35-foot yawl the Perdida.

Suddenly, he said, the entire boat lifted off the water and then slowly rolled nearly on her beam with the mast parallel to the surface of the water.  The Perdida then righted herself again once the danger had passed.

Thought technically not a tornado (since it fortunately didn’t touch down) it was nevertheless a close call not only for my friend and the Perdida, but for the town of Avalon.

That was during the winter of 2004, the evening of Dec. 28, to be exact, in the midst of the same storm that saw a similar tornado pass very close to the Airport-in-the-Sky.

Fast forward now to the following October and another surreal experience I had with a local tornado (actually a waterspout in this case).  

The day was warm and sunny and I was walking along Via Casino Way from the Casino into town in my shorts and flip-flops.  There had been no violent storms of late and the wind was practically non-existent.

I looked out into the channel and saw an oddly-shaped cloud about halfway across the channel—the only cloud in the sky.  Beneath this cloud, however, was a sight I’ll never forget:  twisting and writhing from the surface of the sea was a colossal waterspout.  Although it was a good 10 miles away, I could clearly see the sides of its thick trunk glistening in the sun like scales on an enormous serpent.  

At its base, the ocean’s surface was spraying what seemed to be hundreds of feet into the air.

The phantom cyclone didn’t last long and in less than a minute the twister lost its mid-section and began flailing apart.  Within five minutes, there wasn’t a trace of it left.

Like all of our local “natural disasters,” tornados and waterspouts are exceedingly rare.  Before you go digging a basement under your Eucalyptus Street home, be advised that no one has ever been killed on Catalina by a tornado.  In fact, to my knowledge, no local tornado has ever even caused significant damage.

One of the reasons that our local tornados and waterspouts are so feeble compared to their powerful cousins in the Midwest involves the mechanics behind their formation.  Midwestern tornadoes tend to be borne of the violent clash of cold arctic air coming down from Canada mixing it up with warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico.

Our local twisters, on the other hand, tend to be the result of localized winds swirling and eddying around the Channel Islands, including Ours Truly, Catalina.  The localized nature of these formative winds also explains why these phenomena have a life expectancy of only minutes as opposed to the multi-hour tornadoes of the Midwest.

Catalina Island loves its visitors. But tornados and waterspouts are the kinds of visitors we can do without.

Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” available at Amazon, Kindle and in stores all over Avalon.