Claims like this needs hard evidence.
The debarking was over an area of dead trees and I don't think it's as impressive as it actually looks. The rest I have no opinion on.
Displaced an entire grove of (possibly hardwood) trees from a hillside and scoured the grass on the hill away, which we have photos of. I don't have them on me.
Oh, absolutely. I don’t have any images myself, but @HAwkmoon has an excellent set of posts on Tri-State along with an article, and while it is subjective to consider one more violent than the other, the damage imagery I’ve seen from Tri-State leads me to believe that it was comfortably more violent than Bremen’s damage in the worst affected areas. The one that sticks out to me the most is the completely debarked grove of hardwood trees of a species ranked highly on the Janka scale; can’t remember which species, but they were so thoroughly obliterated in a way that was comparable to/exceeded other extremely high end events.
I included Barnsley due to the lofting of train cars.
That one was definitely violent too but not on the same level as West Kentucky.
New Richmond is so overshadowed. That thing did absolutely vicious damage. Was basically Bridge Creek before it even happened.
I think it’s fair to say that the 2021 Tri-state tornado was more than capable of producing EF-5 level damage at different points during its lifecycle, but that the extremely rural nature of the areas it tracked through likely kept us from seeing what the tornado was fully capable of at peak intensity.
Yea, what that tornado did to New Richmond is pretty much what would’ve happened had Bridge Creek maintained its first peak intensity and width through Moore.
Those train cars were a different, lighter model than the ones from Enderlin. Regardless, Enderlin-type calculations of the wind speed needed to throw the Barnsley train cars were indeed still done by Moriarty, and they came out in the EF2 range. It was a totally different situation than Enderlin.
So you agree with me then?
I think it was around Bremen intensity for a good few moments of its life. I'm also pretty sure there have been images from either @HAwkmoon or @locomusic01 showing high end intensity periodically. Albeit it does feel like Tri-states feats are a bit unusual, so it really comes down to opinion. Somewhat related, but I would also add Tupelo 1936 into the mix of strongest tornadoes of all time given it seems to have been Smithville level intensity.
As someone later down the thread just said, the damage from the New Richmond tornado reminds me a lot of Joplin, although the comparisons to higher-end tornadoes like Bridge Creek are also warranted.
I'm not trying to be a jerk but anyone who downplays Tri-State has simply just done basically zero real research. I've seen this a handful of times and frankly it's just silly.
