Most 2020 Thing Ever: National Weather Service Issues ‘Fire Tornado’ Warning

There are a whole lot of us alive today who will find ourselves in a very archetypal role in the coming decades, as we’re asked by our children and grandchildren to speak in front of their classrooms.

The subject we’ll be asked to pontificate upon will undoubtedly be the year 2020 – one of the strangest, scariest, and most action-packed years in modern history.  We’ll tell tales of our encounters with murder hornets during a global pandemic and an economic downturn, where we drank a whole heck of a lot and somehow completely forgot that World War III almost started.

And, not to alarm anyone, but we still have the 2020 presidential election to come, and two months of the year after that to go.

So, why wouldn’t we also have “fire tornadoes”?

The Reno office of the National Weather Service warned Northern California of a fiery tornado Saturday afternoon that had sprung up near a large, fast-moving wildfire in the Sierra.

That’s right: A firenado.

It is the first known issuance of a tornado warning for the climate phenomenon since it burst into California’s consciousness during the deadly Carr Fire in 2018.

Wendell Hohmann, the NWS forecaster who penned the tornado warning said that it was the first time to his knowledge of a tornado warning of this nature.

“It’s probably the first time it’s been issued outside of a thunderstorm environment,” Hohmann said.

The warning read like the script of a SyFy original movie.

“The Loyalton Fire to the east of the Sierra Valley exploded most impressively this afternoon, with a very large pyrocumulus and reports of fire tornadoes,” the warning said. “Due to the possibility of very strong fire-generated winds and extreme fire behavior with danger to fire personnel, a tornado warning was issued to heighten awareness in the area of the fire”

We can’t even imagine what 2020 will have in store next for us.