Up to this point in 2012, at least 57 people have been killed by tornadoes across the country.  Thousands more have been injured and countless homes have been reduced to splinters.  In fact, there have been a couple of small towns that have been essentially wiped off the map by giant tornadoes.

What we are witnessing is not normal.  Prior to the horrific tornadoes that we saw on Tuesday, there had been 326 tornadoes in the United States so far in 2012.  That is about twice as many as usual for this time of the year.

Overall, the United States only sees about 1,200 tornadoes for the entire year usually.  The busiest time of the year for tornadoes is still a way off, and we are on pace for a truly historic year.

But it is not just the number of tornadoes that is the problem.  Many of these tornadoes are immensely powerful.  The following is how the local CBS affiliate described the damage done by the recent tornadoes in Texas….

Multiple tornadoes threw tractor-trailers in the air, ripped the roof off an elementary school, leveled houses and shut down airline traffic out of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport as one of the worst storms in years hit North Texas Tuesday.

Baseball-sized hail punched holes through car roofs, and a Red Cross spokeswoman warned the breadth of the destruction may not be cleared until well into Wednesday. The mayors of Arlington and Lancaster declared a state of disaster following the storm strike.

There were even reports of massive “debris balls” in Dallas, Ellis, Johnson and Tarrant counties.  These tornadoes picked up huge amounts of debris into the air that were just carried along by the storms.  That must have been an absolutely horrifying sight to behold.

A lot of jaw-dropping footage from these tornadoes has already been posted on the Internet.  For example, the following video shows tractor trailers being tossed about like rag dolls….

Have you ever seen anything like that before in your life?

I know that I haven’t.

Look, one bad year can be dismissed as a coincidence.

But two historically bad years in a row?

Many would call that a trend.

Last year, America experienced one of the worst tornado seasons of all time.  Many Americans will never, ever forget the devastation caused by the tornadoes of 2011.

For example, National Geographic reported that a gigantic F5 tornado that ripped through the Tuscaloosa, Alabama area had winds of up to 260 miles an hour.  If you drive through Tuscaloosa today you can see that they are still trying to recover.

And Joplin, Missouri may never be the same again after what happened to that city last year.  The gigantic tornado that ripped through Joplin was called by some the deadliest single tornado in more than 60 years.

That mammoth tornado ripped a path of destruction through Joplin that was more than a mile wide and more than 6 miles long.  You can see some amazing before and after photographs of Joplin right here.

But people don’t think about what happened to Joplin much anymore because there have been so many other horrific disasters since then.

Overall, 2011 was the worst year for natural disasters in U.S. history.

Many were hoping that there would be a return to normalcy in 2012.

Unfortunately, that simply is not happening.

In 2012, we have already seen one of the worst tornado outbreaks ever recorded in the month of March in all of American history.  A couple of small towns in Indiana were virtually completely wiped out by that outbreak.

Sadly, what we have already seen in Indiana and Texas may just be the warm up act.

The truth is that usually May is the worst month for tornadoes in the United States.

So how bad are things going to get this year?

How many other communities across the nation are going to be absolutely ripped to shreds before tornado season is over this year?

In 2009, there were 1146 tornadoes in the United States.

In 2010, there were 1282 tornadoes in the United States.

In 2011, there were 1691 tornadoes in the United States.

In 2012, we are on pace to far exceed the total we saw in 2011.

So would could be causing all of this?

Do you think that you have a theory that explains these tornadoes?

Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below….

The post Why Is The Heartland Of America Being Ripped To Shreds By Gigantic Tornadoes That Are Becoming More Frequent And More Powerful? appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

In the new survey mentioned above, those contacted were asked to select the top three potential catastrophes that worry them the most.

The following results come directly from the survey….

Economic Collapse: 63%
Natural Disaster: 46%
Terrorist Attack: 44%
Global Disease Outbreak: 33%
Global War: 27%
Nuclear Accident: 25%
Global Warming: 22%
Fuel Shortage: 15%
Cyber War: 8%
Famine: 8%
Oil Spill: 6%
Industrial Accident: 5%

As you can see, “economic collapse” was the winner by a wide margin.

So are there good reasons for the American people to be concerned about an economic collapse?

Of course there are.

Back in 2008, a financial crisis that began on Wall Street was felt in the farthest corners of the globe.

This time, ground zero for the financial crisis is going to be in Europe.  As I have written about previously, the European financial system is rapidly coming apart at the seams.  The euro continues to drop like a rock, and banking stocks continue their long-term decline.

Many people expect a “financial collapse” to happen on a particular day.  But that is not how it happens usually.  Instead, it is often like a snowball that starts rolling downhill very slowly at first but that eventually become a huge avalanche.

Right now, we are seeing the financial world come apart in slow motion.  A recent article posted on Automatic Earth included a list of the year-to-date performance of some of the most prominent global banking stocks.  These numbers are absolutely staggering….

• BofA: -60.38%
• Citi: -44.76%
• Goldman Sachs: -46.41%
• JPMorgan: -23.03%
• Morgan Stanley: -45.24%
• RBS: -50%
• Barclays: -34.32%
• Lloyds: -63.02%
• UBS: -29.33%
• Deutsche Bank: -28,55%
• Crédit Agricole: -56.04%
• BNP Paribas: -37.67%
• Société Générale: -59.57%

But because these numbers happened over the course of a year and not on a single day it doesn’t feel quite as much like a “collapse”.

Unfortunately, things are about to get a whole lot worse.  Global credit markets are really freezing up – especially in Europe.

Considering the fact that the entire global financial system is based on credit and debt, that is a very bad thing.

Our system simply does not work when banks do not want to lend money to each other or to businesses.

Just yesterday there was an article in the Guardian that talked about how it looks like the credit crunch may be getting even worse….

“If European banks are still this concerned, it’s not a good sign,” said Karl Schamotta, senior markets strategist with Western Union Business Solutions. “That underlines the possibility that this liquidity crunch is getting worse and will continue into the new year.”

When banks cut back on lending, that causes the money supply to shrink.  When the money supply shrinks substantially, it is almost impossible to avoid a recession.  A recent article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard detailed how the money supply in many eurozone nations is shrinking at a very rapid pace right now….

Simon Ward from Henderson Global Investors said “narrow” M1 money – which includes cash and overnight deposits, and signals short-term spending plans – shows an alarming split between North and South.

While real M1 deposits are still holding up in the German bloc, the rate of fall over the last six months (annualised) has been 20.7pc in Greece, 16.3pc in Portugal, 11.8pc in Ireland, and 8.1pc in Spain, and 6.7pc in Italy. The pace of decline in Italy has been accelerating, partly due to capital flight. “This rate of contraction is greater than in early 2008 and implies an even deeper recession, both for Italy and the whole periphery,” said Mr Ward.

Those are very, very frightening numbers.

About the only thing propping up European banks right now is the fact that the European Central Bank is loaning them gigantic piles of cheap money.

But there is a big problem.

European banks are running out of collateral for those loans as an article in the Wall Street Journal recently noted….

Even after the European Central Bank doled out nearly half a trillion euros of loans to cash-strapped banks last week, fears about potential financial problems are still stalking the sector. One big reason: concerns about collateral.

The only way European banks can now convince anyone—institutional investors, fellow banks or the ECB—to lend them money is if they pledge high-quality assets as collateral.

Now some regulators and bankers are becoming nervous that some lenders’ supplies of such assets, which include European government bonds and investment-grade non-government debt, are running low.

So what happens when banks all over Europe start running out of collateral and can’t get any more loans?

The answer should be obvious.

As I detailed a few days ago, many prominent voices in the financial world now believe that we could be looking at a financial crisis that will be even worse than 2008.

If you want to see what happens when a collapse happens and a depression begins, just look at what is happening in Greece….

*100,000 businesses have been closed since the beginning of the crisis.

*About a third of the nation is now living in poverty.

*The unemployment rate for those under the age of 24 is 39 percent.

*The number of suicides has increased by 40 percent in the past year.

*Thefts and burglaries nearly doubled between 2007 and 2009.

Things have gotten so bad that hundreds of families in Greece are abandoning their children.

Some are taking their children to charitable institutions and others are handing them directly over to the government.

The following sad story of one Greek family comes from an article in the Guardian….

“Psychologically we were all in a bit of a mess,” said Gasparinatos. “We were sleeping on mattresses on the floor, the rent hadn’t been paid for months, something had to be done.”

And so, with Christmas approaching, the 42-year-old took the decision to put in an official request for three of his boys and one daughter to be taken into care.

“The crisis had killed us. I am ashamed to say but it had got to the point where I couldn’t even afford the €2 needed to buy bread,” he told the Guardian. “We didn’t want to break up the family but we did think it would be easier for them if four of my children were sent to an institution for maybe two or three years.”

Does that seem shocking to you?

Well, all of this is coming to America eventually.

Someday we will see American parents abandoning their children because they cannot take care of them anymore.

Someday we will see suicides absolutely skyrocket in America because people have lost all hope.

Someday we will see thefts and burglaries soar to unprecedented heights as millions of desperate people attempt to try to find some way to survive.

It is all coming.

The federal government cannot pile up a trillion dollars of additional debt every year indefinitely.

We cannot afford to see an average of 23 manufacturing facilities a day in the United States shut down.  Eventually there won’t be anymore factories to shut down.

We cannot afford to keep putting millions more Americans on welfare.  At this point the government is feeding 46 million Americans a month.  Will the government eventually be feeding most of us?

The U.S. economy is getting weaker and weaker and weaker.  All of the long-term trends are absolutely nightmarish.  We are accumulating debt faster than ever, and our ability to produce wealth is diminishing faster than ever.

There is no way that things are going to be okay if we stay on the path that we are currently on.

So the truth is that Americans should be very concerned about an economic collapse.

It is coming and it is going to be very painful.

The post The Number One Catastrophic Event That Americans Worry About: Economic Collapse appeared first on The Economic Collapse.

The F5 tornado that ripped through the Tuscaloosa, Alabama area was reportedly so monstrous that it is still kind of difficult to believe that it was actually real.  The thing was a mile wide and scientists are estimating that it had winds that exceeded 260 miles an hour.

According to National Geographic, this monster tornado may have traveled a whopping 300 miles across Alabama and Georgia.

Can you even imagine the kind of devastation that we are talking about?

It is hard to even conceive of how much damage a mile-wide F5 tornado with winds of up to 260 MPH would do as it traveled across 300 miles.

Dozens are dead and close to a thousand people are injured in the city of Tuscaloosa alone.

At this point, the city looks like a war zone.  In fact, Tuscaloosa mayor Walter Maddox says that his city has been “obliterated”.

A stunned Maddox was quoted by The Telegraph as saying the following about the devastation….

“I don’t know how anyone survived,” said Mr Maddox. “It’s an amazing scene.

A state of emergency has been declared in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

But this disaster will not be “cleaned up” in a few days or a few weeks.

This was literally a history changing event for millions of people.

The last time the death toll from a tornado outbreak was this high was back in March 1932.

If you have the time, try to watch some videos of the devastation caused by these tornadoes.  It is incredibly difficult to try to do the damage caused by these tornadoes justice using only words.

The following is how an article posted on USA Today describes the devastation in the town of Smithville, Mississippi….

Powerful tornadoes swept through this northeastern Mississippi hamlet and across much of the South on Wednesday, splintering homes, shearing roofs and destroying lives. Smithville’s Town Hall was destroyed, as were the local high school, four churches and each of the town’s 14 businesses. Mattresses hung from tree branches, cars were flattened as if stepped on by giant feet, and rows of three-story pine trees snapped in half.

Do you think that Smithville will ever be the same?

Yes, the tornadoes of 2011 will be remembered for a very, very long time.

The people living in these areas deserve our prayers.

Thousands of lives have been permanently altered forever.  The following is just one example that CNN reported on….

Janet Puckett stands outside what’s left of her home on 30th Avenue in Alberta. Its walls crumbled under the force of the storm. Her living room and a front bedroom disappeared. The roof of the house got sucked up, too.

“A war zone,” she says of the mountains of broken 2-by-4s and other debris all around.

How would you feel if your roof and half your house were suddenly missing?

Would you rebuild?

Would you feel safe living in the same area?

Would your life ever be the same again?

Sadly, massive tornado outbreaks seem to be happening with increasing frequency in the South.

Back on April 16th, a similar wave of very violent thunderstorms spawned approximately 140 tornadoes.  During that event, 22 people were killed in the state of North Carolina.

Overall, there have been approximately 600 tornadoes in the United States during April.  That is the most tornadoes that have ever been recorded in a single month.

Usually, the U.S. only experiences about 1,200 tornadoes for the entire year.  So what we are seeing right now is highly unusual.

The tornadoes that just ripped through the South also had a massive impact on the economy down there.

It has been estimated that up to 25 percent of all of the poultry houses in Alabama were either significantly damaged or destroyed.  It is also believed that millions of birds were killed.

Alabama produces more chicken than anywhere else in the United States except for Georgia and Arkansas.

So get ready to pay more for chicken.

Meanwhile, many key agricultural areas of Texas are experiencing their worst drought in decades.  According to CNBC, climate experts are becoming extremely concerned about the lack of rainfall….

Data issued Thursday by a consortium of national climate experts said 95 percent of Texas was suffering “severe drought,” or worse, up from 92 percent a week earlier. More than 70 percent of the state was in the worse conditions of “extreme drought” or “exceptional drought.” That is up from 68 percent a week ago in extreme and exceptional drought.

Not only that, some areas along the Mississippi River are having to deal with “historic flooding” right now.  The following is from a recent article on Accuweather.com….

As if tornadoes and damaging thunderstorms were not enough, historic flooding is also threatening the Mississippi River, below St. Louis, as well as the lower part of the Ohio River.

The rising waters are expected to top levels set during February 1937. This mark is the middle Mississippi Valley’s equivalent to the 1993 event farther north along Old Man River.

Things are really crazy out there right now.

Please pray for those that lost family and friends during these recent tornadoes.  There are thousands upon thousands of good people down in the South that are really hurting right now.  They could really use our prayers.

As I have written about previously, our world is seemingly going crazy right now and nothing is stable anymore.  The earth is shaking, natural disasters are becoming worse, the economy is falling apart and America appears to be coming apart at the seams.

Unfortunately, I believe that things are going to become even more unstable in the months and years ahead.

So what do all of you believe?  Feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….

The post The Tornadoes Of 2011: The Worst Natural Disaster In The United States Since Hurricane Katrina appeared first on The Economic Collapse.