Tornado Destroys 100,000 Homes, Kills 130 in India

When the term "cyclone" is used in Europe and Asia, it can take some time to determine whether that converts to "hurricane", "tornado" or "low-pressure system" in English because the terms are used interchangeably overseas. But this report out of India where 100,000 homes were destroyed (leaving a quarter of a million homeless and 130 dead), says it was, in fact, a tornado.

Precise information on past events is hard to obtain on the country but this would probably make this storm the most destructive tornado ever recorded in the country - looking at the WikiPedia entry for Asian Tornadoes, only "hundreds" of homes have been destroyed in past outbreaks, though the TornadoProject.com page says that 15,000 homes were flattened in the 1998 tornado that occurred in India's eastern states. The Indian national weather service is quoted from the story below on this week's storm:

The article also says that the extreme storm may have been brought on, in part, by the massive heat wave that plagued the country last week.