If I'm not mistaken, bathtubs are usually made of fiberglass or cast iron, and behave weirdly in tornadoes. There's the famous story of a woman surviving a near direct hit by the Jarrell F5 in a bathtub, and yet weaker tornadoes like the 2011 Almena, KS EF3 have flipped and/or damaged them:
from what i understood the jarrell tornado threw her with the bathtub before the EF5 winds hit that spot.If I'm not mistaken, bathtubs are usually made of fiberglass or cast iron, and behave weirdly in tornadoes. There's the famous story of a woman surviving a near direct hit by the Jarrell F5 in a bathtub, and yet weaker tornadoes like the 2011 Almena, KS EF3 have flipped and/or damaged them:
So by this same logic, does that mean Almena was an EF5 and Jarrell was a 170MPH EF4? I don't think so.
Yes. Out of the 16 houses with a DOD of 10 only 5 were documented in the toolkit. 8 were described as being well built with anchor bolts.
On tubs, the old ones were cast iron weighing about 160lbs and up. Steel tubs came along somewhere after WW2 but didn't entirely replace cast until about 1960. Those weigh about 1/4 of cast iron and are still common. Fiberglass tubs became common in the 80's and weight little.If I'm not mistaken, bathtubs are usually made of fiberglass or cast iron, and behave weirdly in tornadoes. There's the famous story of a woman surviving a near direct hit by the Jarrell F5 in a bathtub, and yet weaker tornadoes like the 2011 Almena, KS EF3 have flipped and/or damaged them:
So by this same logic, does that mean Almena was an EF5 and Jarrell was a 170MPH EF4? I don't think so.
Greenfield’s rating is fine and NWS Des Moines did a great job surveying this tornado. I think the main reason why they didn’t include damage photos for many of the DIs was because they wanted to respect the homeowners privacy and refrained from making pictures of their destroyed homes available to the public. I remember they did the same thing with the Winterset tornado.Guys I was being sarcastic lol. Or maybe... Is this why the 2014 Smithfield, NY tornado was rated EF2
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On a more serious note. I took a look at Greenfield's damage survey and started circling all the homes without pictures. It was too many so I had to start circling the homes with pictures instead.
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141 homes surveyed
Only 32 had pictures taken (22%)
31 homes had EF4 damage
14 Had pictures taken (45%)
43 Had EF3 Damage
11 Had Pictures (26%)
How is this acceptable? It'd be one thing if they at least wrote descriptions of the houses, but they didn't. It's just blank. This is the best they could document the second strongest tornado of all time?
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Red was rated EF4, orange is EF3, Blue didn't even receive a rating.
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These don't have pictures. The third to the right looks well constructed and is right on a main road. How did they not document it?
Yes. Out of the 16 houses with a DOD of 10 only 5 were documented in the toolkit. 8 were described as being well built with anchor bolts.
Edit:
I've attached a picture showing where the overhead pictures are located along the damage path. Does anyone have the ability to (or want to) question the NWS Des Moines office about it? One of the reasons ratings continue to be wrong is probably because people don't keep the pressure on while the rating is still preliminary. people should want to know why it's being rated this way now, not after it's too late and the surveyors can deflect blame. @TH2002, thoughts?
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If I’m not mistaken, I’m pretty sure you have to ask for permission to take a close up photo of someone’s house if destroyed.
i could of sware that it was stated the alabama part of the smithville tornado wasnt rated EF4+ because there was no close up evidence .... if this is the case we need a way to rate a tornado EF5 ... WITHOUT getting close to a home .... if you cant then remove the EF5 rating. its already starting to get hard to rate stuff EF4 as well.
You can survey a home without taking photos.
It certainly seems like a hot take with the amount of people that believe Greenfield should have been rated EF5, but I personally believe Greenfield’s rating was completely fine as well, because the survey didn’t actually leave the confines of the EF scale the way it is defined. I don’t think anything in Greenfield genuinely justifies an EF5 rating. The winds recorded were certainly insanely impressive, but I’d be willing to bet a lot more justified HE EF4’s and maybe even some EF3’s have windspeeds around that level above the ground. If the tornado went through Greenfield at peak intensity it would maybe have had a better shot at getting an EF5 rating.
This also goes to show that the EF scale probably does underestimate tornadic wind speeds if winds of 300+mph were recorded in Greenfield, but it didn't inflict EF5 damage.
Show me the mathematical calculations that say it’s impossible. The EF scale’s windspeed measurements are based on wind physics and engineering math. The math is telling us 165 MPH winds are capable of sweeping badly built homes off their foundations, and I tend to trust math more than subjective opinion.
im wondering if they are using the wind speed of the 0.1% chance of having this damage happen instead of having a 25-75% chance for the failure to start i remember a old presentation that shows one DOD was 100% wrong
It's definitely not a probability thing. The math we do on structures involves using forces to determine what wind load certain structures can take before they give out. It isn't a "0.1%" thing. I would guess that the problem with the math we use to calculate the windspeed estimations is taking place in an overly idealized world and is not taking enough into account. Most of the time, the calculations I see from wind engineers are both unidirectional and uniform in magnitude on the object being affected and this simply does not ever occur in the real world, especially when talking about the extremely complex wind dynamics within the vortex of a tornado.
The tornado was proven to have had winds of 300+mph when it was in Greenfield, and as I said earlier, the EF scale definitely underestimates tornadic wind speeds. However, the surveyors had to stay within the confines of the scale and survey the damage without incorporating radar-measured wind speeds because that would be inconsistent with previous surveys and go against the entire point of the scale, which is rating the damage. The damage in Greenfield is definitely on the level of a mid-high end EF4 and the rating reflects that.
I do agree that I definitely can't trust every single one; John Robinson coming to mind specifically. But I do trust the bulk opinion of them, and the scientists responsible for a lot of ratings, because I do research in astronomy, not meteorology/engineering, lol.
Completely agreed. This is an online forum and we're all trying to level with each other here. No reason to be getting upset with each other.
Hi, what was the construction of the building you are talking about?
