Be Excellent To Each Other

When the Old Ones Returned: The April 27-28th Tornado Outbreak

Part One:

A Brief History of Tornadic Diaster & Weather Warning

Back in the old days tornadoes were the stuff of dark and morbid folk ballards, songs commerating death on a biblical scale, spreading the news with banjo and histronics. In 1934 Uncle Dave Macon sang of the 'Tennessee Tornado', that struck the small town of Cherry Hill. Memories were still fresh of the great Tri-State Tornado of March 18th, 1925, the deadliest tornadic event in US history. This behemoth tracked 234 miles and killed 695 people. (Some say it was even higher since until the 1950's black people were not counted in the final casualty lists.) People spoke of how it looked like a boiling cloud, rolling along the ground. Normally weather-wise farmers failed to take shelter, baffled as they were by the absence of the usual tell-tale flunnel. There is no such thing as an average number of annual fatalities when it comes to tornadoes, they are too capricious. Before doppler radar and dedicated weather reporting the annual numbers could vary from as little as a dozen to up to five hundred. The usual number hovered in the one hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty bracket. Both the layman, the scientist and the politician saw tornadoes as an essentially random catastrophe - impossible to predict and futile to study. They were firmly in the province of God.



Tri-State Tornado.

Or at least they were, until several high profile tornadic outbreaks in the 1950's. On the 20th Junte 1957 a slow moving tornado struck Fargo, North Dakota. This slow moving tornado tracked through the town at 19mph. The toll was relatively low for one of its power, thanks largely to the slow speed. Ten people were killed and one hundred and three injured. But because of its speed the Fargo tornado became the first tornado to be extensively photographed. It made front page news across the United States and the US government was finally stirred into properly funding tornadic study via the US Weather Bureau. It wasn't just the injection of cash that aided study, the development of doppler radar meant that the presence of the tornado could be detected through the rain pattern and debris, a tell-tale 'hook' on the screen and a little adjacent ball showing the vortex and debris cloud. But the greatest contribution to US tornadic research came from an eccentric Japanese scientist called Ted Fujita. Fujita had been studying tornadoes since 1948 in Japan, but his efforts were largely unfunded and amateur. Fujita from his own study found that tornadoes produced a downward current of cool air. Unknown to him, the United States Thunderstorm Project had come to the same conclusion. Shortly after, Fujita recieved a copy of Dr. Horace Byer's report on nonfrontal thunderstorms from a friend who had found it in the trash. He was astonished that Byer's reports and theories closely echoed his own. Fujita quickly struck up a correspondence with Byers, leading the professor to invite Fujita to join him at the Department of Meteorology at the Unversity of Chicago in 1953 for a two year appointment.
Fujita quickly impressed the team, studying an outbreak that very year that lead him to develop a plan of the storm's structure. In 1956, Fujita acquired a VISA to permamently work in the US and the following year he made his groundbreaking study of the Fargo tornado. Using the many photographs taken, he plotted a minute by minute path of the tornado and its structure. His paper, 'A Detailed Analysis of the Fargo Tornado of June 20, 1957' led to the birth of a direct terminology for all the features of a tornado, from supercell to wall cloud. This serious, dedicated analysis gradually revealed a tell-tale run-up to the formation of super-cells, which in turn birthed tornadoes. Little by little, radio news networks began to offer tornadic risk warnings when conditions seemed dangerously right.

Fujita kicked off the 1970's by inventing a scale to measure the power of tornadoes. Rather immodestly he named it after himself. The scale kicks off at F0, merely enough to knock down trees and small outbuildings. F1 tears the roof of flimsy houses and tosses over mobile homes. F2 tears the walls off wooden homes. F3 does the same to brick houses. F4 smashes anything up to a concrete house. An F5 practically erases anything in its path, right down to the foundations - concrete and all. Unlike a Hurricane safir-simpson scale, the Fujita scale runs on damage done, rather than windspeed - though F4's usually range at around 200mph and F5's can top out at an apocalyptic 300mph. The scale was important, however, as it gave the media something to fix upon. Ted Fujita became 'Mr Tornado', and his scale fueled interest in budding meteorologists.

In the decades of the 50's and the 60's tornadoes remained unfussily damaging. The odd one popped up and killed a few dozen people but they individually did little to capture national interest. This all changed with the infamous 1974 Super Oubtreak. From April the 3rd to April 4th one hundred and forty-eight tornadoes swept across thirteen American states and even the Canadian border. The outbreak surpassed all previous records in severity, longevity and extent. The final toll of 315 fatalities made it the deadliest since the 1925 tri-state tornado. Hardest hit was the town of Xenia in Ohio, where one tornado killed 34 and destroyed a large chunk of the town. A recording of the approaching storm was made by one resident who fled to his basement moments before it hit. You can hear the nails being pulled from the woodwork. A mile away, sixteen year old Bruce Boyd captured footage on his Super-8 of the tornado sweeping through town. President Nixon made a visit to the town a few days later. He said, "As I look back over the disasters, I saw the earthquake in Anchorage in 1964; I saw the hurricanes...Hurricane Camille in 1969 down in Mississippi, and I saw Hurricane Agnes in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. And it is hard to tell the difference among them all, but I would say in terms of destruction, just total devastation, this is the worst I have seen."



Audio recording and Bruce Boyd's Super-8 synched

But then, things changed. Network TV spread across America and local news outlets began to field their own dedicated weather reporters on TV and radio. With backdrops of doppler radar these men gave both warning and education and sometimes became local celebrities in themselves. Networks of tornado warning sirens were set up and paired with television and radio reports residents began to receive warnings that ranged from a few vital minutes up to - eventually - a leisurely half hour to seek shelter. The annual tolls began to drop. 1984 saw 122 deaths. In the 1990's a new element began to take shape. Teams of storm chasers swept America armed with handheld video cameras and radios. Film the tornadoes they'd also update local news networks who would in turn warn residents in the area. Portable doppler radars enhanced precision mapping of each individual tornado - though the holy grail of launching a probe into a vortex remained frustratingly elusive. In 2002, in Alabama, Tuscaloosa's James Spann was giving a weather bulletin with the usual live backdrop of the downtown area filmed from a camera atop county hall. To their immense surprise and shock a tornado formed and rolled into camera view. Over the next nine minutes Spann battled with a fantastically incompetent camera operator to deliver a live blow by blow narration of a storm's path. Using his long-standing local knowledge he practically announced street by street the path of the funnel. The Natioanl Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave Spann the Emmy for the event. More importantly, Spann - along with fellow meteorologists Mark Prater and John Oldshue, undoubtaly saved lives in the path of this F4 tornado. Stunningly, only eleven lives were lost.
Over the next decade the internet went portable. Mobile phones texted updates. Stormchasers ditched their own bulky radars and with laptops and ipads logged into the National Weather feeds for their mapping. Digital SLR's and camera-phones recorded incredible footage of tornadoes sweeping over airbases, through forests and into towns. And still the tolls stayed low. People hunkered down in the path of the storm, went down into basements and stormshelters. The only people who ever seemed to get clobbered were luckless mobile home residents. Tornadoes now became the preserve of YouTube and the 'And finally...' section on news channels. Though property damage remained severe, it seemed never again as if a tornado would cause the terrible sort of toll of 1974 Xenia tornado and its stablemates. It seemed utterly unbelievable that an outbreak would ever surpass that figure.



James Spann being The Man - this was the first 'Breaking News' footage of a tornado ever.

(No, he isn't a giant. Don't fear him.)



McConnell Airforce Base Tornado, one of the most famous and dramatic pieces of tornado footage ever.

You've probably correctly identified me as being fairly obsessed with tornadoes. I'm not alone. Websites such as Weather Underground rack up hundreds of comments over weather-patterns alone. Communal knowledge has never been better. The non-fatal, non-injurous nature of 99% of tornadoes (far more people are killed falling off their own toilet seat in America) provided a relatively guilt free 'oooh' at the spectacle of nature. Also, slowly and painfully old myths have been debunked. Fewer people than ever believe the old wives tales of opening windows in the path of a tornado to equalise pressure within the home to prevent an explosion. For a while thanks to dramatic footage of people surviving a near miss by hiding under an overpass, people kept pulling over and putting their lives in extreme danger by crowding under bridges in the paths of tornadoes. That was finally hammered home as a bad idea. No one looks to one side of the basement as being more safe than another. Footage of tornadoes hitting skyscraper filled cities and sweeping across rivers and valleys dispelled the myth that certain places are 'protected' by topography.
But there was another myth, a stranger, more nebulous gut feeling - and ultimately a false one. It was simply this - this is the modern era, true disasters don't happen anymore in first world countries. This belief was shaken by Katrina, but it still seemed to hold true when it came to tornadoes. I mean, people can simply watch TV and when it gets near, they go down in the basement, right? Everyone hears the sirens, there are nearly storm shelters enough for all. Everyone's seen the footage so people know what they can do, people aren't stupid, people will take cover.
And everything will be fine. We're just not going to see dozens sucked up and spat down anymore. The days of the Uncle Dave Macon's hit making material were gone.

Turns out we were wrong.

Part Two coming up:

Why We Were Belms to think That.

I have no doubt that you are a fantastic asset to this forum. Bravo, NervousPete, bravo.

This should be in a sunday supplement. Great stuff

Pete, you should be earning money for this kind of thing, mate. Great stuff.

Ta dudes, full of typos though! Will be editing and producing a more polished version. Would have worked on it for longer, but had another date - which was pretty awesome!

Second installment to come on Saturday evening most likely, meanwhile some updates:

The toll of the 27th-28th has risen to 329 which makes it officially more deadly than the super-outbreak, and the worst since the tri-state tornado. There's also rumours that the tornadic track for the Tuscaloosa tornado on Wednesday runs further than the tri-state, thus breaking the record. This is historic stuff.

Here's some footage of one of the Mississippi state tornadoes from the recent oubreak. A very fast moving, dramatic one, but as far as the outbreak goes one of the weaker examples - probably an F1 or at most F2. Still enough to do some nasty damage though.



EDIT: The toll for Tuscaloosa city alone has jumped from 36 to 64 now. This is expected to rise still higher. And now to bed.

Thanks Pete, brilliant! Looking forward to part 2.

I was ready to post the final couple of chunks of this article, feeling pretty confident that the worst of this year's already unusally bad tornado season was over. Sadly, a new terrible diaster indicates that I was wrong.

Without doubt 2011 is going to go down as the worst year for tornadoes since the 1930's. In the last twenty-four hours a major tornado up to three quarters of a mile wide hit the town of Joplin (population 50,000) in Missouri. Reports say up to 75% of the town has been levelled. Offically the toll is at 30 but coroners warn it will rise to at least 100 with reports of a portable morgue set up in the football field. This will put the tornado down as the worst single storm since the tri-state tornado in the 1920's. The storm struck on Sunday evening, demolishing entire apartment blocks, the fire station, a Wall-Mart, several (mercifully empty) schools, a hospital, a nursing home and many businesses and homes. St. John's Regional Medical Centre was hit, sustaining major damage resulting in multiple fires throughout the building. Firefighters fear these may be the result of an explosion caused by a broken gas line. One resident 45 miles has reported medical debris in his garden dropped by the supercell. It's almost as if the tornado was deliberately trying to hit the worst places possible.

The tornado was prefaced by a twenty minute warning on the sirens. However, the funnel itself was wrapped in a thick shroud of heavy rain in fading light and so was practically invisible from the ground. Multiple vortices were also reported, giving it an usually high suction power. These two factors may account for the high toll. Sirens aren't always strictly followed as there is usually visual confirmation of the approaching storm, which gives the public time to hit shelter. The recent Tuscaloosa tornado is an example, the progress of which was tracked live on television and radio by the weather news. Information may have been far more sketchy, resulting in more people caught unawares and away from shelter. People may not have been aware until they saw the transformer flashes on its final approach.

The footage from the air incredibly seems to show the damage to be worse than Tuscaloosa. No F rating has been given yet, but this is at the very least an F3 and with the grim reports of suction vortices sucking patients out of the hospital, an F4-5 is almost certain. Rescue workers are only just beginning to really get out there after been delayed by severe weather watch, but things don't sound good.

One heartening detail is that Tuscaloosa and the counties of Alabama are rushing aid up to the state, along with medical teams. Let us hope that Joplin stands up to this blow with the same fortitude, charity and good sense as Tuscaloosa did. A severe weather watch is still in place many areas including Kansas, which suffered a less severe but still fatal twister, and the system that's generating this awful weather looks to be in place for the next couple of days to come.


More to come this week as I try and make some sense of all this. But without doubt as I said earlier, this is the worst year since the 30's for tornadic activity and deaths.

I blame HAARP.

Looks like Joplin was indeed hit hard. Toll so far set at 116 from just the one tornado, which is pretty unprecedented for the age of doppler radar and the warning system. This one looks certain to be a F4 with a six mile track, varying between half a mile and three quarters of a mile wide. This one stole up like a thief in the night, shrouded as it was in rain. What cover people took was simply stripped away. Again, looking at the damage which is literally on a par with Japanese tsunami - nothing left - there's immense surprise that anyone emerged from this. There are a lot of injuries however, maybe between 1500 and 2,000. That's from a population of 50,000. This was a tornado powerful enough to rip tarmac from the road, break gas pipes and start fires, pull the bark from trees and hurl cars hundreds of feet and flip trucks with their trailers still attached upside down. Winds between 166mph and 200mph estimated.



DerekFME, there are quite a lot of southerners blaming global warming on HAARP, rather than, say, their ridiculous SUV's and our fossil fuel burning addiction. I now take your facetious statement and hammer it into the ground by relentlessly continuining this obsessive thread with a question...

(... pauses while there's a general rush amongst Beexers for the exit doors...)

... is this severe season a result of global warming? Hard to say, but I think not. Even though the number of tornadoes are 500 above average so far this year, this isn't a model-breaking occurrance by any means, it's just the number that are hitting populated areas that is weirdly off-kilter. Luck of the draw. Now if you're talking the current mississippi flooding, well, that may have been caused by increased rapid snow melt by higher average temps dumping a lot more moisture into the system than usual. And the Gulf of Mexico is looking rather hotter than it should be as well, perfect for a busy hurricane season. Basically global warming = America being weather's bitch.




Footage of Joplin tornado forming, followed by tornado crossing road and their approach into Joplin mere minutes after being hit. Wary of bad language being frowned upon on US TV, stormchasers say, "Gosh," a lot.




What is rapidly becoming an infamous video, this records audio from people taking shelter in a convenience store when the tornado hits and collapses part of the roof on top of them. All survive with only minor injuries, but be warned, it's pretty damn shocking stuff.




US Weather Channel reporter Mike Bettes was the first on the scene within half an hour of the town being stuck. After breaking down on air he qucikly gave up reporting and went off looking for survivors. Where Bettes is at is one of the main downtown streets of the town.

The severe weather isn't letting up either, with tomorrow predicted for further outbreaks due to pefect supercell-generating conditions in the midwest. The TORCON index for parts of South Kansas and Oklahoma rates at a 7/10, which means a 70% chance of a tornado within 50 miles of you. These odds are expected to shorten. Conditions are highly favourable for another bad day. Texas, Missouri, Arkansas and Nebraska are also under threat. Just found out from Wunderground as I type that meanwhile in Ohio tornado warnings are sounding as funnel clouds have just been spotted and Oklahoma is apparently receiving its first visits too. Cleveland, Cincinnatti and Tulsa metropolitan areas have potential tornado-spawning supercells forming. One confirmed on the ground near the city of Fairfax. (Though people are jumpy right now out there so actual tornado sightings post outbreak can be taken with a pinch of salt, unless you're in the area - natch.) Also, a police officer searching for survivors in Joplin has just been struck by lightning. Cheers, God.

It's going to be another long 24 hours for the Midwest.

(Posted over half hour span)

Just got back from meal and movie at Rixondale's. Checked in to Wunderground due to some very worrying potential systems posted earlier regarding perfect storms. There was a link to KFOR Live Weather News with streaming video. This involves choppers following tornadoes and complex radar footage with narration. From what I can understand Guthrie, Shawnee Mall area and Newcastle are getting hammered by potential F4's and F5's in Oklahoma - massive stove-pipe tornadoes. Huge. They're dropping out the sky all over the place across OK. Fatalities already reported. One bunch of storm chasers have alreadynearly been blown off the road with telegraph poles snapped around them. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp ... 9#43159589 You can see the poles snap off around them.

Live cast, tornado trackers on KFOR - http://www.kfor.com/news/livestreaming/

Shit, traffic headed inexplicably towards tornado. It's lifting... a rope tornado F4 dissipating and reassembling. Debris balls all over the doppler radar. Running along I40 road. The impression I get is that they're heading through low populated counties and hitting glancing blows on the edges of the sprawling towns, threading between them. Hoping they keep missing, as it is rush hour there at the moment. KFOR has the feed up and a facebook tracker underneath with warnings going out and witness reports. Incredibly, towns glanced on the FB stream are reporting the tornado passing by and giving directions and next place in line, these places in turn giving estimates as to how long it'll hit. They're saying there are so many tornado reports out there right now they can't keep count. El Reno (pop 16,000) sounds bad. Gas explosions. No injuries reported yet though, phew. WTF is up with this tornado season? At least after recent events everyone should be taking cover as soon as the sirens blow.

As a side report they've posted 1500 reported missing in Joplin, but like Tuscaloosa this is certain to plummet down to a couple of dozen. I hope.

Ardmore in the path of a big one, pop 24,000. Crossing I35 - may just be missing it, may be headed into it... not sure. Hints that it missed. Phew.

Huge, aforementioned tornado has lifted. Is no longer on the ground. Phew. Weather tracker describes it as 'pushing deep and large'. Yes, you're allowed to snigger at this dark time.

Town of Goldsby (pop 1200) hit by huge tornado. Holy fucks. Good news is that one of the news choppers landed amongst the splintered homes and folk emerged explaining that everyone ducked into the shelters in time. Here's hoping that'll be the theme of this event. Chopper camera cutting to tornado. Shit, it's huge. Half a mile wide, I'd say. Doesn't say if its live footage or a flashback. Wunderground is saying that the tornadoes have all lifted from the ground and dissipated now.

Hmm, tornado back on the ground now near I40.

Breaking news. Looks like 8 confirmed deaths so far.

Guess I better go to bed...

I was watching that feed, linked form another source (Hull mate with about 3 storm shelter's worth of family in that zone over there) until the wee small hours. The stormchaser guy in the car was a fucking dick. Interesting weather though.

Pete, you really aught to do this stuff for a living, you are super awesome indeed.

I was talking to my Dad last week sometime about my two stepbrothers who live ten mins away from each other in Ohio (I think), he said that a tornado a mile wide had passed right between both of their houses. Now *that's* scary.

Phew, it wasn't as bad as they thought. The tornadoes did manage to thread their way between the population zones, so there weren't many fatalities. The big radar returns showing monster tornadoes were mainly from extensive baseball-sized hail pummelling the areas, though EF4's did go wandering around the place. It's an inverse of the previous outbreak, where the tornadoes just kept hitting populated areas, and the immense bad luck of Joplin being hit by a severe but highly localised earlier outbreak. Over 150 tornadoes are thought to have been moving on the ground over the last four days with the majority yesterday, though mostly these latter ones were down for only a short while due to the system being too unstable to sustain them. El Reno and Piedmont bore the brunt of the attack, with Sedalia also badly damaged. Fortunately the tornadoes narrowly missed Kansas and Tulsa and just avoided a repeat visit on Joplin, though high straight-line winds did finish off a few empty and shaky buildings there.

Meanwhile this remarkable and chilling tale from Joplin:



Remember the first person video of the convenience store from an earlier post? The one that was mostly audio? Here's what they climbed out of, a cramped space in a crushed cooler full of beer bottles and tilted shelves:



This was taken from a Kansas skyscraper, it shows downtown transformers exploding in the middle of the night. These weren't caused by tornadoes as far as I can tell, but massive downbursts of wind descending at high velocity. I don't think many houses were damaged, but it was rather spectacular. Wrapped in rain and at night, a tornado if there would have been practically invisible however. Downdrafts that accompany tornadoes themselves usually account for some of the more destructive damage.



Finally, stumbled across this, it's from last year, a tornado in Texas. It's a mere F2 at 125mph, between a half and two thirds the speed of the F5 that hit Joplin. Incredible footage though. Happily, no one was killed in this one:

Cheers lass. I just find it fascinating to follow, the way they deliver the updates and the entire network of information they've got going and the way they keep the public updated - it's incredible. The TV forecasters there don't pander and has the full terminology for those who want it. (Unlike the follow up network news reporters on the ground.) It does get a bit too freaky at times, and I keep questioning how weird I am for getting obsessed over this stuff. A lot.



Only saw it up until I made that post. Am catching up now after going out to see Attack the Block. (Which is fucking awesome, incidently.) Stormchasers usually sound like dicks. Correction, there's usually one or two quiet and long-suffering chasers in the car and one idiot who keeps screaming out "MASSIVE DAMAGE!" or something, embarrassing the collective and ensurign they shudder with associated shame when their videos get picked up by the news networks. However, tornado-spotters are a vital part of the warning system, confirming tornadoes on the ground and passing the information on to NOAA's storm prediction centres and local TV/Radio networks. They also get trained in first aid and double as emergency responders. The ones who drove into Joplin in an earlier video gave up the chase there and began to tend to the injured.

More tornado watches (there may be a tornado coming in your area) deployed now and quite a few tornado warnings cropping up all over the shop (tornadoes are imminent in your area.)





So looks like around 18 hours after the last outbreak a new one is deploying. Not sure how severe. Early yesterday they said that the one that day would be very severe (it was, but as I said jammily missed most places) and that today's would still be severe but substantially less so than Tuesday's. You can track the storms here from the KSDK feed in St. Louis:

http://www.ksdk.com/news/article/260424 ... re-Weather

Also St Louis news:

http://www.kplr11.com/news/live/

There's a feed on Fox2 as well, for those who don't mind sinister evil mega-global organisations:

http://www.fox2now.com/news/livestreaming/

Watch them all at once and feel like Batman.

Meanwhile for St. Louis and other affected states all normal programming is superceded by these updates by federal mandate. So anyone wanting to watch the very last scheduled Oprah episode out there will have to wait until tomorrow. St Louis feed has just announced that the tornado warnings are drying up, so it may not be that bad at the moment - but they are urging caution. The next two hours will tell...

Pete!

http://chakalakasp.imgur.com/sweet_storm_8711

ARGH IT'S THE ALIEN MILLIPEDE MONSTER OF THE END TIMES

That's quite clearly Falkor.

That's fucking mental.

Beautiful.

What? He's being sucked up? I don't understand. That's a supercell wall cloud, not a tornado vortex.

...

Wait a mo...

*Quick google image search*

Ahh. I see, yes, very clever.

Got to add, I don't know I missed that update of those Imgur pics you posted the first time, but good God. Incredible.

I would give a months pay to spend a day photographing something that amazing. Easy.