This survey does appear to be pretty poor application of the EF scale. Dare I say verging on EF scale misuse (as opposed to more common laziness or incompetence.)
The home, which many others are posting above, was a clearly well constructed home which was ~50% swept clean. The surveyors then assign DOD 9 - all walls destroyed, as opposed to DOD 10 - I suppose you can make a justification for this, even though its probably not consistent with the ratings from other offices. Yet, they then assign 20mph below the EXP... for apparently no reason?? They even themselves state the proper placement of anchor bolts, the connections are completely sound, and the foundation is not CMU. Even in today's climate, I am confident most other offices would go at least 165mph on this, and even a majority of those would probably go EXP 170mph. And then again, I think the decision was to go DOD 9 was slightly unusual.
Essentially there are multiple chains of reasoning which together just dont make sense. We've ended up with objectively the highest-end damage from Lake City being rated lower than a couple other, less impressive structures *even* when considering construction. Is almost comical to be honest.
Normally I err on the side of exact rating being unimportant when considering the damage, particularly right in the wake of a tornado. But the distinction in EF3/4 tornadoes is often quite an important one - both for climatology and environmental intensity, and especially for this day where we had a SPC High Risk, in which the SPC is explicitly aiming to forecast violent tornadoes. This has potential implications for the forecast without reason, in particular when you consider the transition to even more explicit conditional intensity forecasting that is to come in the next few years and am sure is being tested in outlooks like this. It is fairly obvious this event contained multiple EF4 intensity tornadoes.
