RICHMOND -- The storms that swept Virginia on Sunday debunked four persistent myths about tornadoes and geography in one evening.
1. Tornadoes can and do hit cities: Separate tornadoes tracked through the limits of Lynchburg and Danville, as well as Greensboro, N.C. They all missed the dense downtown areas, but weather history gives us dozens of examples where a tornado did just that.
2. Rivers aren’t barriers for storms: The Danville tornado crossed the Dan River, and the Lynchburg tornado proceeded right across the James into Amherst.
3. Tornadoes can appear in mountainous areas: The Craig County one was 1,300 feet above sea level. The rotating thunderstorms that spawn tornadoes are tens of thousands of feet tall, much higher than even Mount Rogers.
4. Just because something hasn’t happened in a place before doesn’t mean it can’t. Prior to Sunday, there was no record of a tornado in Craig County or Lynchburg, and it was the first in nearly three decades for Amherst County.
This map — updated to include the most recent reports from this weekend — shows which Virginia counties and cities have been affected by a tornado in recent years, and which have gone the longest without seeing one.
Some of what we see in the map is due to climatology and some of it is the ease of reporting, but a great deal of it is just chance.
Official National Weather Service records for tornadoes date back to only 1950. Since then, there haven’t been any reports from several counties in the mountains and several independent cities with a small area.
Meanwhile, Fauquier County saw four tornadoes last year, though three of them were back-to-back from the same thunderstorm on one day.
The Piedmont is the most active part of the state for tornadoes, but that doesn’t mean the mountains or big cities are immune.
Richmond and Henrico County both saw their last tornado on Oct. 27, 2010.
The last tornado to strike central Virginia was in Amelia County on Jan. 12, which was also the first one in the United States in 2018.