Significant Tornado Events

[buckeye05]

This is kind of a weird topic, but I have a certain morbid fascination with the bizarre, almost inexplicable ways that some people die in tornadoes. This weekend I was talking to the granddaughter of the Albion-area woman who was killed in the car I posted photos of the other day. Since she lived in a trailer, the woman's daughter had picked her up and was planning to try and outrun the storm. For some reason, after she got her in the car, she ran back inside to grab a flashlight. It probably only took 30 seconds, but it was long enough - the daughter got back to the car and tried to take off just as the tornado swallowed them up. She was badly hurt but the steering wheel held her in place; her mother was sucked out of the car, thrown into a ditch and killed.

A woman near Cooperstown was killed when she and her husband were running to a cellar out in the yard. She was apparently worried they wouldn't have a bathroom if the house got destroyed, so she told her husband to go ahead while she went back to use the bathroom. Her husband survived unharmed. A similar scene played out near Tionesta, except the wife had gone back to make sure she'd turned the oven off. An Amish man was killed in Atlantic as he sat in his favorite spot on his porch, sipping lemonade and stubbornly refusing to take shelter even as his family begged him to join them in the basement. A man was killed by the Bridge Creek-Moore tornado because he'd just gotten one of those huge mechanic tool sets w/the cart and whatnot and.. I guess thought he was going to protect it somehow?

Those deaths are no less tragic than any others, of course, but it's oddly fascinating to see the strange reasons people end up meeting their fate.

Damn, those first two stories. So tragic, yet so avoidable. Having a flashlight or bathroom won’t even matter if you don’t survive. It’s almost like that wasn’t even considered? Then again, someone in a panic-inducing situation may not be thinking too logically to begin with.

Reminds of when my SO and I were pulling out of the driveway to get the hell out of the way of the Dayton EF4 back in 2019, and he jumped out, ran back inside, then sprinted back out with his phone charger and a water bottle. I about had an aneurism. He’s not from a country that gets violent tornadoes on the reg, so he didn’t quite grasp the seriousness of the situation. He did once I drove him through the damage path though!

 

[pohnpei]

Something newly discovered founding about Chapman's railway damage, nothing spectacularly new anyway.
I recheck this railway damage photo today and found It had been shoto from north to south, rather than south to north that I used to thought, which means the railway was distorted opposite to the direction of the tornado. I always thought that tornado pushed the railway forward this place but It seems that I was wrong. So If these conclusion are right, how the hell It can be done? There was simply no debris west of the railway or right side of the second pic so no way debris hitting theory.
The only guess here was tornado sucked the railway towards the tornado when It went really close due to pressure gradient, which was more ridiculous to think than the previous idea of tornado pushed the railway forward or maybe.....Ok, to be honest, I literally have no idea how the hell It can be done!
View attachment 10765View attachment 10766View attachment 10767

One more little thing may need to add about Chapman was that famous vehicle impaled into a planter damage. The vehicle itself was most likely a fuel truck rather than a normal car.You can barely tell from the style of its headstock, headlights and chasis.
That was how It should looked like before, though not exactly the same one.

after

 

[locomusic01]

Damn, those first two stories. So tragic, yet so avoidable. Having a flashlight or bathroom won’t even matter if you don’t survive. It’s almost like that wasn’t even considered? Then again, someone in a panic-inducing situation may not be thinking too logically to begin with.

Reminds of when my SO and I were pulling out of the driveway to get the hell out of the way of the Dayton EF4 back in 2019, and he jumped out, ran back inside, then sprinted back out with his phone charger and a water bottle. I about had an aneurism. He’s not from a country that gets violent tornadoes on the reg, so he didn’t quite grasp the seriousness of the situation. He did once I drove him through the damage path though!

Yikes! I bet that's the last time he'll do that, haha. And yeah, a lot of people just don't function very well in high-stress situations. I've seen people do some really bizarre things under pressure. Unfortunately, in a tornado sometimes the smallest things can prove fatal.

Speaking of which, I'm also fascinated by the seemingly insignificant little decisions that either spare people or cost them their lives. In Niles, a couple was driving to a restaurant for an end-of-year staff party (both were teachers). The woman often drove, but for no particular reason the man was behind the wheel that day. As with the mother and daughter I mentioned earlier, he was held in place by the steering wheel and she was thrown from the car and killed. In Wheatland, an elderly woman who lived with her adult son sent him to the post office to mail a letter. The man had no idea a tornado had even hit until he returned and got to within a couple of blocks from his home, at which point he found his house literally gone and his grandmother dead.

Conversely, I talked to a couple just outside of Beaver Falls who were planning a big anniversary party that night. Half an hour before the tornado, they got a call that their daughter was going into labor and they decided to cancel the party and rush to the hospital. If they hadn't, there would've been 25-30 people at their house, which was totally demolished.

And then there are the mass-casualty incidents that thankfully never happened. The industrial park in Barrie that was obliterated would've had several hundred people still at work if it weren't for the Grand Valley tornado destroying a bunch of high-voltage transmission towers earlier and killing power to that part of the city. What might've been an even greater disaster was avoided further to the east by the most implausibly narrow of margins. I'm just gonna copy/paste the relevant section of my article:

Just to the east, an already devastating situation very nearly became an unfathomable calamity. The tornado savaged a small industrial park on the west side of Highway 11 — now known as Yonge Street — ripping apart a row of warehouses and storage facilities. One of the demolished properties was a propane distributor with several large, fully-loaded storage tanks on-site.

When the powerful vortex swept through, it snatched up a school bus and hurled it into the industrial park. The battered bus landed with a crunch and came to rest among the propane tanks, missing several of them by a matter of feet. A direct impact likely would have ruptured the tanks, violently depressurizing the liquefied gas inside and triggering a catastrophic boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion (BLEVE). Fire officials later estimated that the resulting blast wave and aerosol fireball may have reached a mile in diameter.

I've mentioned this before, but if the Niles tornado had struck the Top o' the Strip roller rink about 45 minutes later, there would've been 300+ kids there for free pass night. Just east of Niles, the tornado missed a huge trailer court by little more than a hundred yards:

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Yikes! I bet that's the last time he'll do that, haha. And yeah, a lot of people just don't function very well in high-stress situations. I've seen people do some really bizarre things under pressure. Unfortunately, in a tornado sometimes the smallest things can prove fatal.

Speaking of which, I'm also fascinated by the seemingly insignificant little decisions that either spare people or cost them their lives. In Niles, a couple was driving to a restaurant for an end-of-year staff party (both were teachers). The woman often drove, but for no particular reason the man was behind the wheel that day. As with the mother and daughter I mentioned earlier, he was held in place by the steering wheel and she was thrown from the car and killed. In Wheatland, an elderly woman who lived with her adult son sent him to the post office to mail a letter. The man had no idea a tornado had even hit until he returned and got to within a couple of blocks from his home, at which point he found his house literally gone and his grandmother dead.

Conversely, I talked to a couple just outside of Beaver Falls who were planning a big anniversary party that night. Half an hour before the tornado, they got a call that their daughter was going into labor and they decided to cancel the party and rush to the hospital. If they hadn't, there would've been 25-30 people at their house, which was totally demolished.

And then there are the mass-casualty incidents that thankfully never happened. The industrial park in Barrie that was obliterated would've had several hundred people still at work if it weren't for the Grand Valley tornado destroying a bunch of high-voltage transmission towers earlier and killing power to that part of the city. What might've been an even greater disaster was avoided further to the east by the most implausibly narrow of margins. I'm just gonna copy/paste the relevant section of my article:

I've mentioned this before, but if the Niles tornado had struck the Top o' the Strip roller rink about 45 minutes later, there would've been 300+ kids there for free pass night. Just east of Niles, the tornado missed a huge trailer court by little more than a hundred yards:

That thing with the bus and Barrie is like something out of a Hollywood movie, something similar happened with Edmonton in 1987 where the tornado narrowly missed a large section of propane or some other highly flammable gas tanks.
The thing with Niles is how narrow its core was; the majority of damage was in the F0-F1 range from it so you really had to be dead center to be hit by F5-level winds due to how narrow the range they occupied; still remarkable the gradient of damage from this thing. I'm struggling to think of a tornado with such a tiny core for its intensity; Plainfield comes to mine but it was nowhere near as intense (and I'm not sure about its F5 rating). I get the impression with Niles-Wheatland though; anyone or anything in the dead center of its was pretty much well, dead.

 

[MNTornadoGuy]

Damn, those first two stories. So tragic, yet so avoidable. Having a flashlight or bathroom won’t even matter if you don’t survive. It’s almost like that wasn’t even considered? Then again, someone in a panic-inducing situation may not be thinking too logically to begin with.

Reminds of when my SO and I were pulling out of the driveway to get the hell out of the way of the Dayton EF4 back in 2019, and he jumped out, ran back inside, then sprinted back out with his phone charger and a water bottle. I about had an aneurism. He’s not from a country that gets violent tornadoes on the reg, so he didn’t quite grasp the seriousness of the situation. He did once I drove him through the damage path though!

How far in advance of the tornado were you trying to drive out of the way of the Dayton tornado?

 

[CheeselandSkies]

That thing with the bus and Barrie is like something out of a Hollywood movie, something similar happened with Edmonton in 1987 where the tornado narrowly missed a large section of propane or some other highly flammable gas tanks.
The thing with Niles is how narrow its core was; the majority of damage was in the F0-F1 range from it so you really had to be dead center to be hit by F5-level winds due to how narrow the range they occupied; still remarkable the gradient of damage from this thing. I'm struggling to think of a tornado with such a tiny core for its intensity; Plainfield comes to mine but it was nowhere near as intense (and I'm not sure about its F5 rating). I get the impression with Niles-Wheatland though; anyone or anything in the dead center of its was pretty much well, dead.

For another 4/27 reference...sounds a lot like Smithville.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

For another 4/27 reference...sounds a lot like Smithville.

Smithville's core wasn't all that tiny in relation to its circulation (it actually had two cores, interestingly enough) but I get your perspective. Smithville was WAAAAAY more violent than Niles-Wheatland, though.

 

[locomusic01]

This might be better suited to its own thread, but I figured it'd be more visible here - does anybody have experience digitizing old video tapes? Any recommendations on the easiest option? I found a guy whose father shot video of the Albion tornado but he understandably doesn't want to part with the tape itself, so I offered to pay to digitize it.

I get the impression the guy isn't exactly tech-savvy, so ideally I'm looking for the simplest possible solution, even if it's more costly. I've found a few mail-in digitization services, but since he didn't want to mail me the tape I'm not sure he'd go for mailing it anywhere else either. Hopefully I can talk him into it because that seems like the way to go.

 

[buckeye05]

How far in advance of the tornado were you trying to drive out of the way of the Dayton tornado?

We bailed as soon as the debris ball popped up around Brookville, OH. Our old place was next to a highway exit onto 675 that dives due-south. Had about a 20 min window. Got south of the path and pulled into a McDonalds parking lot and let it pass north of us. Only sign of it was one distant power flash in my rear view mirror. The tornado missed our neighborhood, but not by much. Could smell the splintered wood and shredded vegetation in the air when we got back home. Wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t a supercell with a very consistent, clear path with nothing to our south.

 

[buckeye05]

This might be better suited to its own thread, but I figured it'd be more visible here - does anybody have experience digitizing old video tapes? Any recommendations on the easiest option? I found a guy whose father shot video of the Albion tornado but he understandably doesn't want to part with the tape itself, so I offered to pay to digitize it.

I get the impression the guy isn't exactly tech-savvy, so ideally I'm looking for the simplest possible solution, even if it's more costly. I've found a few mail-in digitization services, but since he didn't want to mail me the tape I'm not sure he'd go for mailing it anywhere else either. Hopefully I can talk him into it because that seems like the way to go.

I'm sure some of the staff at my college will know about this. I know someone who has had a long career in news video, and I'm sure he has experience with this, or at the very least connections to people who do. I can ask him when I'm in class on Monday.

Also holy crap you found video of the Albion tornado. That is remarkable. I really hope you can convince the guy to work something out with you. It makes me wonder. How many dusty home video VHS tapes containing never before seen, historic tornado video are gathering dust in attics and basements across the US. Probably a lot.

 

[TH2002]

This might be better suited to its own thread, but I figured it'd be more visible here - does anybody have experience digitizing old video tapes? Any recommendations on the easiest option? I found a guy whose father shot video of the Albion tornado but he understandably doesn't want to part with the tape itself, so I offered to pay to digitize it.

I get the impression the guy isn't exactly tech-savvy, so ideally I'm looking for the simplest possible solution, even if it's more costly. I've found a few mail-in digitization services, but since he didn't want to mail me the tape I'm not sure he'd go for mailing it anywhere else either. Hopefully I can talk him into it because that seems like the way to go.

Easiest way is to hook up a VCR directly to a computer's video capture card. In most cases you will need to buy one, but they are not expensive and you do not need a super high end gaming PC (some PC's from the 90's had capture cards built in)

If you want to have it sent in, use pretty much any service other than Legacybox.

 

[CheeselandSkies]

I have a device that's basically a USB video capture card. I'd have to find my VCR, though, and hope it still works after years in storage.

 

[locomusic01]

I'm sure some of the staff at my college will know about this. I know someone who has had a long career in news video, and I'm sure he has experience with this, or at the very least connections to people who do. I can ask him when I'm in class on Monday.

Also holy crap you found video of the Albion tornado. That is remarkable. I really hope you can convince the guy to work something out with you. It makes me wonder. How many dusty home video VHS tapes containing never before seen, historic tornado video are gathering dust in attics and basements across the US. Probably a lot.

Cool, thanks! Yeah it's incredible how much stuff is actually out there that no one knows about because it just never occurred to the person/their family that it might have historical value. I've also talked to two different people who mentioned seeing video of the Tionesta tornado crossing the Allegheny River, but it was many years ago and neither could recall who shot it or where they saw it. Another person said they used to have a copy of a tape showing the Corry F4 shot from somewhere north of Columbus, which is around when it maxed out at just over a mile wide. Apparently they threw it out years ago in the process of moving, which is absolutely incomprehensible to me.

Easiest way is to hook up a VCR directly to a computer's video capture card. In most cases you will need to buy one, but they are not expensive and you do not need a super high end gaming PC (some PC's from the 90's had capture cards built in)

If you want to have it sent in, use pretty much any service other than Legacybox.

Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. I'm sure I could do it easily if the guy would send me the tape, but I suspect it's probably well beyond his abilities even if I buy the equipment for him. If he didn't live a thousand miles away I'd drive there if I had to. Almost tempted to anyway lol

I guess trying to talk him into a mail-in service is probably my best bet.

 

[locomusic01]

I have a device that's basically a USB video capture card. I'd have to find my VCR, though, and hope it still works after years in storage.

My grandmother passed away recently and when I was helping to clean out her house I found an old VCR and one of those 19" TVs that weighed like 600 lbs. I hooked it up and was amazed to find that it still worked.. and then I threw it all out. Go figure.

 

[TH2002]

Guess it's a good thing I've held on to one of my VCR's. Well I admit I threw one out recently because I could never get the takeup reel spinning reliably, but the other was an easy fix. Wondering when these things will be worth something.

 

[locomusic01]

Yeah it's incredible how much stuff is actually out there that no one knows about because it just never occurred to the person/their family that it might have historical value.

Which reminds me, no one seems to have had any idea that any photos existed of the Saegertown-Centerville tornado (another example of an F3 that absolutely should've been an F4 BTW) until recently, but it turns out someone did manage to take a few. And not only that, they were taken right around the time it was at peak intensity. Wish they were a bit clearer, but still pretty excited about it:

 

[MNTornadoGuy]

I found some new photos of damage from the 2005 Chaoyang tornado on the Chinese Typhoon Forum. It produced very intense vehicle damage and debarking. It also appears there might be ground scouring in some of these images.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

I'm sure some of the staff at my college will know about this. I know someone who has had a long career in news video, and I'm sure he has experience with this, or at the very least connections to people who do. I can ask him when I'm in class on Monday.

Also holy crap you found video of the Albion tornado. That is remarkable. I really hope you can convince the guy to work something out with you. It makes me wonder. How many dusty home video VHS tapes containing never before seen, historic tornado video are gathering dust in attics and basements across the US. Probably a lot.

Probably a ton of historic footage that simply hasn't been converted and/or by the time someone interested in it comes along, the tape is so degraded to be unconvertable.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Which reminds me, no one seems to have had any idea that any photos existed of the Saegertown-Centerville tornado (another example of an F3 that absolutely should've been an F4 BTW) until recently, but it turns out someone did manage to take a few. And not only that, they were taken right around the time it was at peak intensity. Wish they were a bit clearer, but still pretty excited about it:

Be really cool if you uncover photographs or video of the Moshannon State Forest tornado; I know it's not likely to happen but who knows?
Also, maybe you'll be able to find yet a new video of Niles-Wheatland; I wonder if its touchdown was documented by military cameras and is locked up in archives at Ravenna Arsenal currently?

 

[locomusic01]

Be really cool if you uncover photographs or video of the Moshannon State Forest tornado; I know it's not likely to happen but who knows?
Also, maybe you'll be able to find yet a new video of Niles-Wheatland; I wonder if its touchdown was documented by military cameras and is locked up in archives at Ravenna Arsenal currently?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are more videos of Niles out there somewhere. I know a bunch of people around Ravenna Arsenal saw it touch down and I talked to a few of them, but no one knew if there was any video. Several people also watched the tornado from the roof of the high school; I dunno if any of them had a video camera but it would've been a great vantage point.