Around 7 p.m. on Tuesday, two twisters spawned by Ian's outer bands tore through Broward County in parts of Pembroke Pines and Cooper City, uprooting trees and flipping airplanes at North Perry Airport.
"Tornadoes in the outer band of a hurricane that is in another part of the state are one of the hardest weather scenarios to cover. They happen so quickly and move so fast that they are often gone before anybody can get the message. Luckily they are not usually terribly strong, but can obviously do damage," meteorologist Bryan Norcross of Fox Weather tells New Times.
While Miamians might think twisters are reserved for Tornado Alley and dusty Midwest farms reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, South Florida has seen its share of vortexes.
Among the most memorable was the Great Miami Tornado, which formed seemingly out of the blue in the City of Miami neighborhood of Shenandoah on the afternoon of May 12, 1997.
The tornado swept through parts of East Little Havana and downtown Miami, tearing the roof off an apartment building before heading into Biscayne Bay near the Venetian Causeway. Though the twister was an F1 tornado with relatively low strength on the Fujita scale, it's remembered for its direct path through densely populated communities and the ominous image it stamped on the city skyline. Once it reached the water, the tornado disappeared as quickly as it came.
"It was one of these amazing things because it came out of left field. It just appeared and then it was gone," historian Paul George of HistoryMiami tells New Times.
George, who was working in an office in downtown Miami at the time, says he didn't even get to see the tornado itself, and heading home to Shenandoah without knowing what happened was an eerie schlep through damaged streets.
"Some traffic lights were swinging from their wires, so when you reached an intersection you had to crawl forward. When I got home, our kids' plastic playhouse was thrown over the fence into the alley," George says. "It's largely forgotten today, but it was amazing."
Florida ranked 11th in the nation among U.S. states for frequency of tornadoes in a National Weather Service ten-year analysis ending in 2014. (Texas had the most, followed by Dorothy's home state, Kansas.)
Historical hot spots for Florida tornado activity center around Palm Beach and Broward counties and the Tampa Bay area. Extremely strong tornadoes of the sort seen in the Midwest are infrequent in Florida, and the state averaged about two tornado-related deaths per year from 1984 to 2014.
The deadliest tornado outbreak on record in Florida took place in February 1998 around Kissimmee. At least a dozen tornadoes were reported, and the death toll reached 42 by the time the catastrophe was through.
In South Florida, there have been several notable tornadoes over the past century. And New Times' list of the twisters shows that, while we might not be in Kansas anymore, we're still pretty prone to tornadoes.