After getting an up-close look at a tornado’s fury this past week, like so many in Bristol and Terryville did on Wednesday afternoon, I couldn’t help but wonder how often a tornado or other natural disaster had been featured on a sports trading card.

I found cards for the old NASL’s Dallas Tornado soccer team, WWF wrestler “Texas Tornado” Swanson, the NAHL Texas Tornado hockey team, the Pensacola Tornados basketball team from the old CBA and the Tornado catamaran used in yachting in the 1970s.

Some cards that I found particularly interesting came from a set of NASCAR cards made by Pinnacle in 1997. A 12-card subset called “Texas Tornado” shows drivers like Dale Earnhardt pictured in front of a background image of an intense tornado, their first names seemingly being sucked into the card by the twister — nice looking cards.

A surprising number of sports teams are named after natural phenomena, with the NHL alone putting the Colorado Avalanche, Tampa Bay Lightning, Calgary Flames and, lest we forget, the Carolina Hurricanes on the ice. It may not be a “natural” disaster, but given the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, the Edmonton Oilers also seem to fit the bill. When it comes to actual natural disasters, though, sports cards rarely chronicle such events — with one notable exception.

As anyone over the age of 25 will likely recall, an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale hit the San Francisco Bay Area  on Oct. 17, 1989, at 5:04 p.m. local time — just as ABC was beginning to broadcast Game 3 of that year’s World Series between the Oakland A’s and San Francisco Giants from Candlestick Park. The Series did not resume until 10 days later.

In its 1990 baseball card set, Score captured the scene on card number 701, titled “Lights Out: Candlestick.” The back of the card describes the events of that day and how Major League Baseball reacted.

That earthquake has been featured on several baseball cards since then.

A company called Newfield Publications made a series of collectible “Sports Pages” that were sold via subscription (similar to the 1970s Sportscaster cards) from 1990 to 1996, with a page titled “Split Series” that showed the scene at field level inside Candlestick Park.

In 2005, Topps created a “Classic Events” eTopps card with a picture of the scene inside the stadium on the front and a brief description of the events on the back.

Upper Deck honored the event in a pair of sets last year.

Its 2009 A Piece of History baseball set included a “Historical Moments” subset card of the quake (card #164) with a photo from inside the stadium (the same as from the eTopps card).

Its massive 20th Anniversary insert, which was included in nearly all Upper Deck baseball card products last year, included five cards (#66-70) that picture the partially-collapsed San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge with each card describing either the 1989 World Series itself or the earthquake.

Upper Deck’s 20th Anniversary inserts also feature a number of other natural events that occurred from 1989 through last year: Hurricane Hugo, which caused $10 billion worth of damage in 1989, making it the most destructive hurricane to that time; Hurricane Iniki, which in 1992 became the most powerful hurricane ever to hit the Hawaiian Islands; El Niño, the temperature fluctuations in Pacific Ocean sea water that caused unpredictable weather patterns in 1998; plus global warming, the Asian tsunami of 2004, Mount St. Helens coming back to life and the crumbling of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica.