One thing that I recall is that he had a disproportionate fixation on the significance of ground scouring compared to other damage indicators imo. He had a tendency to put too much weight on the concept of any degree of scouring essentially being an automatic EF5 indicator. He also would sometimes dubiously identify “ground scouring” in damage photo where there was just a little bit of dirt/mud or slight discoloration visible, despite it being insignificant and ambiguous as to what the photo actually shows.
In addition, there were a couple of times where he would draw sweeping conclusions based on research that didn’t go deep enough, which sometimes resulted in spread of misinformation. The big one I remember was his claim that the 1985 Niles-Wheatland tornado did not produce significant scouring or debarking, and this claim got passed around the growing online tornado community quite rapidly, but was years later shown to be very untrue based on research conducted by
@locomusic01.
With all that said, Max played a huge role in getting many people interested in the relationship between tornado intensity and damage, along with the significance of contextual damage. He dug up and published a lot of important information and damage photos, and that’s important. He’s certainly not someone I view in a negative light.
Anyway sorry for derailing the thread a bit.
