Significant Tornado Events

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

I figured I might as well mention extremeplanet. That site still doesn't have any new updates since 2014; whatever happened to whoever ran that blog? I'll post the new link below, it is still accessible for now:

(no title)

All the fascinating severe weather information a researcher can put together, with a hint of sensationalism.

extremeplanet.wordpress.com

Hopefully the admin of extremeplanet can get some renowned attention soon and get back to updating their blog as well. Who knows?

 

[MNTornadoGuy]

I think it might be better for him to write and publish a book concerning notable severe weather events and the like; much easier to get publicity and recognition that way. Perhaps he could compile all of his entries (and make additional ones) into a series of books. It'd be great if maybe multiple people could run Stormstalker instead of just one individual. Might make it more likely for his blog to last well into the future.

TornadoTalk is close to what StormStalker with multiple people running it would look like

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

TornadoTalk is close to what StormStalker with multiple people running it would look like

You're right, their Smithville article is pretty to Stormstalker in terms of how in-depth it is.
Here's an idea; maybe Stormstalker should move his posts over to TornadoTalk; that way they won't be lost to the digital ether if he decides to take down Stormstalker.

 

[MNTornadoGuy]

You're right, their Smithville article is pretty to Stormstalker in terms of how in-depth it is.
Here's an idea; maybe Stormstalker should move his posts over to TornadoTalk; that way they won't be lost to the digital ether if he decides to take down Stormstalker.

He could also join TornadoTalk as one of their writers.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

He could also join TornadoTalk as one of their writers.

Oh duh, should've mentioned that too.

 

[buckeye05]

Here's some Vilonia 2014 pics I've had for a while.

Debarked trees, scoured grass, and debris granulation:

Before and after of Fish Hooks Restaurant, which was a fried fish place. This was a large building, and it pretty much vanished with very little debris remaining. This building was barely mentioned in the text survey, and left completely out of the DAT as well. The third photo is downtown Vilonia from above, and the slab where Fish Hooks was is visible near the top of the frame:

Various swept away homes in Vilonia. Note the severe scouring of grass in the first photo. The last photo is allegedly where a well-built stone construction house stood:

The mostly slabbed structure visible here was a Dollar General store. This is definitely some of the worst damage to a retail building I've ever seen, if not the worst. The building's metal frame was twisted together into a mass and pushed off the foundation.

Aerial view of numerous slabbed homes and extreme wind rowing in the Cemetery Road area of Vilonia. This area also seems to have been skipped in the DAT, despite the apparent extremely violent damage:

 

[Equus]

Vilonia still frustrates me to the point of wanting to throw things and I'm never going to get over it

Astonishingly high end damage

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Here's some Vilonia 2014 pics I've had for a while.

Debarked trees, scoured grass, and debris granulation:

Before and after of Fish Hooks Restaurant, which was a fried fish place. This was a large building, and it pretty much vanished with very little debris remaining. This building was barely mentioned in the text survey, and left completely out of the DAT as well. The third photo is downtown Vilonia from above, and the slab where Fish Hooks was is visible near the top of the frame:

Various swept away homes in Vilonia. Note the severe scouring of grass in the first photo. The last photo is allegedly where a well-built stone construction house stood:

The mostly slabbed structure visible here was a Dollar General store. This is definitely some of the worst damage to a retail building I've ever seen, if not the worst. The building's metal frame was twisted together into a mass and pushed off the foundation.

Aerial view of numerous slabbed homes and extreme wind rowing in the Cemetery Road area of Vilonia. This area also seems to have been skipped in the DAT, despite the apparent extremely violent damage:

That wind rowing in the last photo is on par with Andover in terms of being the most incredible instance of it I've seen.
Also, the Dollar General's steel frame being mangled and pushed off the foundation reminds of what Jarrell did to that steel-frame recycling plant; completely mangled and very little left standing.
Given the amount of areas skipped over by the DAT it really does seem like a cover-up happened so Vilonia wouldn't be rated EF5; I really do wonder what someone would have to gain from that, though.

 

[J-Rab]

That wind rowing in the last photo is on par with Andover in terms of being the most incredible instance of it I've seen.
Also, the Dollar General's steel frame being mangled and pushed off the foundation reminds of what Jarrell did to that steel-frame recycling plant; completely mangled and very little left standing.
Given the amount of areas skipped over by the DAT it really does seem like a cover-up happened so Vilonia wouldn't be rated EF5; I really do wonder what someone would have to gain from that, though.

I’ve wondered if somehow the local government wants to be a state that has never had an F/EF5 tornado for some reason? Maybe to not discourage people from moving to the state. It certainly seems like the state level government could influence the local weather station to maybe fudge it a little to the less severe side of things.

I really don’t know, but it sure seems like they didn’t want that to be rated as highly as it should’ve been. It was pretty clearly an EF5.

 

[eric11]

Tons of photos and discussion had been made.So I just wanna share some damage pics I've collected years ago with regard to Vilonia. Every pic is a clear indication of an EF5 level of damage.







These are the concrete rebars and cement piers that either been flipped over or broken from the base

 

[andyhb]

I’ve wondered if somehow the local government wants to be a state that has never had an F/EF5 tornado for some reason? Maybe to not discourage people from moving to the state. It certainly seems like the state level government could influence the local weather station to maybe fudge it a little to the less severe side of things.

I really don’t know, but it sure seems like they didn’t want that to be rated as highly as it should’ve been. It was pretty clearly an EF5.

Two words: insurance premiums. But still...

 

[J-Rab]

Two words: insurance premiums.

Ahhh, I hadn’t thought of that. Would having EF4’s but not EF5’s really lower the insurance premiums that much, I wonder? It is always about the almighty dollar I suppose, one way or the other.

Well, that makes me more angry about it than I was before.

 

[eric11]

I've once dug deeply into the Hallam NE F4.Having been hearing years ago that the tornado actually consisted of several satellite tornadoes/big subvortices instead of one fully big wedge when it hit the town both from the stormtrack and some storm chaser's blogs.There are hardly any pics I can get as the tornado entered the town or left, neither from the air nor from the ground, the debris pattern is pretty complicated inside the town, no clear-cutting or centerline visible, house damage level varied a lot, which I believe some intense,fast moving subvortices or satellites might have merged with the mother tornado.Tornado itself was huge indeed, but still having a question whether it was capable of reaching 2.5 miles as to be seen as a SINGLE tornado.


Ground were severely scoured at the southern edge(I guess) of the tornado.A silo was torn off its foundation and thrown nearly half a mile, flying opposite to tornado's direction, landing in the field.Severe ground scouring is rare to fast-moving big wedges in Plains.

To the western edge of field, many fully-loaded ammonia tanks were thrown for 50-250m

Hard to say what level of the tree damage it is


Some slabs inside or outside town, I cannot have the exact location



Interesting ground damage.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

I've once dug deeply into the Hallam NE F4.Having been hearing years ago that the tornado actually consisted of several satellite tornadoes/big subvortices instead of one fully big wedge when it hit the town both from the stormtrack and some storm chaser's blogs.There are hardly any pics I can get as the tornado entered the town or left, neither from the air nor from the ground, the debris pattern is pretty complicated inside the town, no clear-cutting or centerline visible, house damage level varied a lot, which I believe some intense,fast moving subvortices or satellites might have merged with the mother tornado.Tornado itself was huge indeed, but still having a question whether it was capable of reaching 2.5 miles as to be seen as a SINGLE tornado.
View attachment 6409
View attachment 6410
Ground were severely scoured at the southern edge(I guess) of the tornado.A silo was torn off its foundation and thrown nearly half a mile, flying opposite to tornado's direction, landing in the field.Severe ground scouring is rare to fast-moving big wedges in Plains.
View attachment 6411
To the western edge of field, many fully-loaded ammonia tanks were thrown for 50-250m
View attachment 6413
Hard to say what level of the tree damage it is
View attachment 6414
View attachment 6415
Some slabs inside or outside town, I cannot have the exact location
View attachment 6416
View attachment 6417
View attachment 6419
Interesting ground damage.
View attachment 6418

I'd say it was a single tornado; it's structure was likely similar to the 2013 El Reno, which at 2.6 miles wide narrowly beats Hallam as the widest confirmed tornado. I don't see Hallam should be considered a single tornado; perhaps it was like El Reno in that the whole mesocyclone was on the ground and there were several tornadoes spawned from it; a multi-vortex mesocyclone? Physical processes just happen, and we attempt to arbitrarily label them in an attempt to understand them.
Also, had no clue this thing did such intense scouring outside of town; pretty impressive, really.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

I’ve wondered if somehow the local government wants to be a state that has never had an F/EF5 tornado for some reason? Maybe to not discourage people from moving to the state. It certainly seems like the state level government could influence the local weather station to maybe fudge it a little to the less severe side of things.

I really don’t know, but it sure seems like they didn’t want that to be rated as highly as it should’ve been. It was pretty clearly an EF5.

Yeah, to this day Arkansas is still the only state east of the Rockies and West of the Appalachians that hasn't had a confirmed F5/EF5 tornado. But obviously several tornadoes in its history definitely achieved that intensity at some point.

I'm not sure if not rating a single tornado EF5 would discourage people from moving to the state though; most people leave Arkansas due to the poverty and lack of jobs. Still, really weird (yet believable )that the state government would deliberately order ratings fudged like that.
Chuck Doswell had a post on his blog (not sure if still there) about the politics of tornadoes and how gerrymandering is often done in tornado-prone districts so more people would move to the area and not think it's tornado-prone or the tornadoes aren't all that violent, and thus ensure more voters in the area for certain politicians as they wouldn't get blamed for a subpar response to a natural disaster, or something to that effect. Wish I could find that article again.

 

[pohnpei]

Here's some Vilonia 2014 pics I've had for a while.

Debarked trees, scoured grass, and debris granulation:

Before and after of Fish Hooks Restaurant, which was a fried fish place. This was a large building, and it pretty much vanished with very little debris remaining. This building was barely mentioned in the text survey, and left completely out of the DAT as well. The third photo is downtown Vilonia from above, and the slab where Fish Hooks was is visible near the top of the frame:

Various swept away homes in Vilonia. Note the severe scouring of grass in the first photo. The last photo is allegedly where a well-built stone construction house stood:

The mostly slabbed structure visible here was a Dollar General store. This is definitely some of the worst damage to a retail building I've ever seen, if not the worst. The building's metal frame was twisted together into a mass and pushed off the foundation.

Aerial view of numerous slabbed homes and extreme wind rowing in the Cemetery Road area of Vilonia. This area also seems to have been skipped in the DAT, despite the apparent extremely violent damage:

This level of ground scouring was highly impressive for a relatively fast moving tornado. I can only recall very few tornado can produce this level scouring under transitional speed of 40mph or greater.
Almost every single house it encountered at its peak was a slab.Many of these slab were swept so clean that I have to speculate that winds must far exceed what needs for to destroy these houses.
It is also no denying that every type of DIs of Vilonia tornado highly indicate of an EF5 tornado, Vehicle damage, tree damage, Ground scouring, steel tank damage and so on.
Here were tree damages it made around Fish Hooks Restaurant area.

 

[pohnpei]

I've once dug deeply into the Hallam NE F4.Having been hearing years ago that the tornado actually consisted of several satellite tornadoes/big subvortices instead of one fully big wedge when it hit the town both from the stormtrack and some storm chaser's blogs.There are hardly any pics I can get as the tornado entered the town or left, neither from the air nor from the ground, the debris pattern is pretty complicated inside the town, no clear-cutting or centerline visible, house damage level varied a lot, which I believe some intense,fast moving subvortices or satellites might have merged with the mother tornado.Tornado itself was huge indeed, but still having a question whether it was capable of reaching 2.5 miles as to be seen as a SINGLE tornado.
View attachment 6409
View attachment 6410
Ground were severely scoured at the southern edge(I guess) of the tornado.A silo was torn off its foundation and thrown nearly half a mile, flying opposite to tornado's direction, landing in the field.Severe ground scouring is rare to fast-moving big wedges in Plains.
View attachment 6411
To the western edge of field, many fully-loaded ammonia tanks were thrown for 50-250m
View attachment 6413
Hard to say what level of the tree damage it is
View attachment 6414
View attachment 6415
Some slabs inside or outside town, I cannot have the exact location
View attachment 6416
View attachment 6417
View attachment 6419
Interesting ground damage.
View attachment 6418

I have a some doubt about whether it was indeed ground souring. It looks like a corn field before and all the other damage photos that can be found were not muddy at all.

 

[J-Rab]

Yeah, to this day Arkansas is still the only state east of the Rockies and West of the Appalachians that hasn't had a confirmed F5/EF5 tornado. But obviously several tornadoes in its history definitely achieved that intensity at some point.

I'm not sure if not rating a single tornado EF5 would discourage people from moving to the state though; most people leave Arkansas due to the poverty and lack of jobs. Still, really weird (yet believable )that the state government would deliberately order ratings fudged like that.
Chuck Doswell had a post on his blog (not sure if still there) about the politics of tornadoes and how gerrymandering is often done in tornado-prone districts so more people would move to the area and not think it's tornado-prone or the tornadoes aren't all that violent, and thus ensure more voters in the area for certain politicians as they wouldn't get blamed for a subpar response to a natural disaster, or something to that effect. Wish I could find that article again.

Yeah, that’s sort of what I was getting at. If the surveyors deliberately rated the tornado below what it should have been, then I can’t think of a ton of reasons why, other than some of the state officials in Arkansas told them to do so.

If they were told to keep it below an EF5, then that is probably an ongoing directive that they have been following for a while... so it wouldn’t be just for this tornado. If they are purposefully doing that then they could be under rating all of the tornadoes that they survey, not just 5 to 4, but also 4 to 3, etc.

If that is the case, then the problem with the Vilonia tornado is that it so clearly produced EF5 damage that it wasn’t really borderline. There really wasn’t a lot left open to interpretation. Keeping the rating one below what other offices would rate it would be easy enough in most of the cases, but when the damage is so clearly above the threshold for an EF5 it kind of sticks out like a sore thumb.

Obviously, this is all just speculation on our part but there has to be a reason for them to so clearly under rate the violence of that storm.

 

[MNTornadoGuy]

Yeah, to this day Arkansas is still the only state east of the Rockies and West of the Appalachians that hasn't had a confirmed F5/EF5 tornado. But obviously several tornadoes in its history definitely achieved that intensity at some point.

I'm not sure if not rating a single tornado EF5 would discourage people from moving to the state though; most people leave Arkansas due to the poverty and lack of jobs. Still, really weird (yet believable )that the state government would deliberately order ratings fudged like that.
Chuck Doswell had a post on his blog (not sure if still there) about the politics of tornadoes and how gerrymandering is often done in tornado-prone districts so more people would move to the area and not think it's tornado-prone or the tornadoes aren't all that violent, and thus ensure more voters in the area for certain politicians as they wouldn't get blamed for a subpar response to a natural disaster, or something to that effect. Wish I could find that article again.

During Finley's time, politicians got angry at Finley for saying that states like Iowa and Kansas were tornado-prone as they feared it might discourage people from moving there.

 

[Equus]

Would be a pretty great take-that to incompetent surveyors if Grazulis ranks it EF5 in the upcoming sigtor book update but that's almost certainly not going to happen