Significant Tornado Events

[AngelAndHisWx]

Fair enough. Where do you find these videos anyway?

This particular video was from a chasing compilation DVD put out in the early 2000s that Bill Reid (of Last Chance, Spencer, and Capitol fame) sent to me. Lon Curtis was the one who provided the video to that DVD, my guess is he had/continues to have access to the video from his tenure at KWTX after May 27 1997.

 

[AngelAndHisWx]

Speaking of Bill Reid, here’s his full Last Chance chase that I restored from the original, almost 30 year old Hi8 tape (the legend himself liked it enough to upload it to his channel):

 

[TH2002]

Check out this recently uncovered video of the May 28, 1996 Bullitt County, Kentucky F4 tornado:

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Check out this recently uncovered video of the May 28, 1996 Bullitt County, Kentucky F4 tornado:

Man, the roar on that thing, thought my speakers were going to blow out lol.

 

[TH2002]

Ah man if only we could go back in time...

KFVS12 Home

Here's a list of what I'm looking for and what is readily available:
Braggadocio Tornado Caught on Tape [LOST]
NEW Tornado Video from Inside Caruthersville High School [LOST]
Caruthersville Tornado Caught On Tape [LOST]
Caught on Tape! High School Cameras Survive The Storm [FOUND]


Caught On Tape: Caruthersville Tornado 2 [FOUND]



Clips from the missing footage can be seen here:

 

[locomusic01]

Well perhaps this will be an extremely thorough article, on par with your stuff on the Tri-State tornado. Or you could just focus on a handful of tornadoes from this outbreak and cut down on the research load, make it easier on yourself. Not sure, lol. Really am glad though that this outbreak is getting a thorough treatment as it's hard to find photographs of many tornadoes and their damage from this event for whatever reason.

Nah I'm gonna cover everything, just gonna take a while. I'm at ~3,500 words and I haven't really done much writing yet, which is probably a bad sign. I do wonder whether it might be better to break the article up into parts. I hate that, personally, but I dunno how many people are interested in reading a literally novella-length article. My last few have averaged ~15,000 and I'll probably end up well over that this time. I'm not doing as much background context as usual, so that'll help keep the count down a bit. I dunno.

On another note, this guy keeps emailing me because he's absolutely convinced that the Johnstown, OH F3 should have been an F5. Like, dude's got a whole thing about it. It's weirdly amusing. He worked at one of the fire departments in Licking County at the time and helped w/search and rescue, so he saw a lot of the damage in person, but I'm not so sure about his surveying skills. It was definitely an intense tornado and probably was capable of F4+ damage in some spots based on contextual evidence, but I suspect the homes that were leveled and/or swept away probably weren't built very well.

Poor guy's gonna be crushed when I don't officially list it as an F5 lol

 

[locomusic01]

Against my better judgement, I have uploaded this to my secondary (technically tertiary) channel. Unlisted for reasons, and y’all didn’t get this from me (probably also a candidate for that historic tornado videos missing from the internet thread):

It will never not make me angry that you have to be so sneaky about such a great (and significant) video. The full video should've been made available to the public years ago. KWTX can go kick rocks.

 

[AngelAndHisWx]

It will never not make me angry that you have to be so sneaky about such a great (and significant) video. The full video should've been made available to the public years ago. KWTX can go kick rocks.

Part of me holds on to hope that the full video will make an appearance like the Scott Guest video for KVUE. I found a (incredibly brief) news report showing a journalist who was out for KWTX that day, I don’t have a name though:

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Ah man if only we could go back in time...

KFVS12 Home

Here's a list of what I'm looking for and what is readily available:
Braggadocio Tornado Caught on Tape [LOST]
NEW Tornado Video from Inside Caruthersville High School [LOST]
Caruthersville Tornado Caught On Tape [LOST]
Caught on Tape! High School Cameras Survive The Storm [FOUND]


Caught On Tape: Caruthersville Tornado 2 [FOUND]



Clips from the missing footage can be seen here:

Only video I knew about from Caruthersville previously was this classic:



If only I could find a version of this without the captions on screen, that'd be great.

 

[TH2002]

Only video I knew about from Caruthersville previously was this classic:



If only I could find a version of this without the captions on screen, that'd be great.

There's also this video:


No luck either when it comes to finding a copy of that one video without the annoying captions, would be great to see all of these videos resurface one day.

 

[TH2002]

While on the topic of tornado videos, one thing that REALLY annoys me is the "auto-stabilization" that YouTube automatically applies to videos that the algorithm deems to be too shaky:



Am I the only one who absoulutely hates this? All it does is make the video look smeared or jitter all over the place, BOTH in some cases, and just overall RUINS otherwise great footage! Goes to show that the executives over at YouTube do an utter piss poor job at running their site, unless you want to say they're running the site into the ground cause they're doing a GREAT job at that.

 

[Marshal79344]

I was looking on newspapers.com and found this clipping of damage from the 1973 West Stockbridge, MA tornado. 3 people were killed at the truckstop. It's very cool to see that textbook convergent swath of tree damage at bottom left approach the truckstop. It's just ominous. The storm would have been so high-precipitation nobody would have known the terrible truth.

 

[CheeselandSkies]

While on the topic of tornado videos, one thing that REALLY annoys me is the "auto-stabilization" that YouTube automatically applies to videos that the algorithm deems to be too shaky:



Am I the only one who absoulutely hates this? All it does is make the video look smeared or jitter all over the place, BOTH in some cases, and just overall RUINS otherwise great footage! Goes to show that the executives over at YouTube do an utter piss poor job at running their site, unless you want to say they're running the site into the ground cause they're doing a GREAT job at that.

To be fair, as far as I know applying the stabilization effect in YouTube is up to the user. Upon uploading, the software will prompt the user with something like "We detected your video may be shaky. Would you like to stabilize it?" If they don't know any better, they will click "Yes." I agree the YouTube stabilizer produces poor results, in many cases having the opposite of the intended effect and making the video harder to watch.

I've had good results with Adobe Premiere Pro's stabilizer effect, at least on footage with a roughly "average" amount of handheld camera shake (with both my older CS6 and whatever version of Creative Cloud 2021 they're on now), but it is pricey software. I don't know if any cheaper NLE software has a stabilization effect that produces similarly satisfactory results.

 

[AngelAndHisWx]

To be fair, as far as I know applying the stabilization effect in YouTube is up to the user. Upon uploading, the software will prompt the user with something like "We detected your video may be shaky. Would you like to stabilize it?" If they don't know any better, they will click "Yes." I agree the YouTube stabilizer produces poor results, in many cases having the opposite of the intended effect and making the video harder to watch.

I've had good results with Adobe Premiere Pro's stabilizer effect, at least on footage with a roughly "average" amount of handheld camera shake (with both my older CS6 and whatever version of Creative Cloud 2021 they're on now), but it is pricey software. I don't know if any cheaper NLE software has a stabilization effect that produces similarly satisfactory results.

It’s not an NLE, but VirtualDub has a two pass deshaker plug-in that yields pretty decent results, at least better than YouTube’s plug-in (used it on some clips extracted from DVD). Also takes into account zooming and if the camera has a rolling shutter. But I digress.

 

[Marshal79344]

I was doing some very in-depth digging on newspapers.com and came across this photo of destruction from a tornado at Aberdeen, MS on April 20th, 1920. Very impressive damage.

 

[andyhb]

I was doing some very in-depth digging on newspapers.com and came across this photo of destruction from a tornado at Aberdeen, MS on April 20th, 1920. Very impressive damage.

Damn that's a rare find right there. Seems to be a number of things pointing to this being a very intense tornado (and outbreak), but that's the first damage photo I've ever seen from it.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

I was doing some very in-depth digging on newspapers.com and came across this photo of destruction from a tornado at Aberdeen, MS on April 20th, 1920. Very impressive damage.

View attachment 9841

Holy crap, a damage photograph from that outbreak! I'd love to find more.
Once upon a time there was this Alabama history blog that had a purported damage photograph from the Marion County, AL tornado of that day (the one that hit Waco Quarry and had a similar eerily similar to Hackleburg) but unfortunately that blog's no longer up. Maybe the photograph is available on newspapers.com, who knows?

 

[MNTornadoGuy]

Anchor-bolted home that was swept away by Pilger West.

Damage from Stanton tornado:

 

[pohnpei]

some rarely seen damage pics of Greensburg2007 south side of the town.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

soMe rarely seen damage pics of Greensburg2007 south side of the town.

Wow so it did do some ground scouring!
I'd love to have aerials of this thing's damage path before it hit Greensburg, how much scouring it did over open plains country before reaching the city limits.