Significant Tornado Events

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Xenia's path reminds me of Niles-Wheatland, just not quite as violent IMO. But in terms of the sharp gradient, the wind rowing, etc.

The narrow streak of violent damage really stands out here:

Xenia also reminds me of Barrie, where there was a visible streak for a very brief period before quickly weakening (yeah, Barrie was likely more violent). I can understand the F5 rating for the Arrowhead subdivisions. Also, did the tornado really touch down right at the edge of the city limits or had it traveled quite a bit before reaching Xenia?

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Yeah that’s the one. The foreground shows nothing but bare soil with all surface vegetation removed. I honestly can’t think of any photos from Hackleburg-Phil Campbell that show anything quite like that, unless it’s something I haven’t seen yet.

I have a feeling that if if some of those black and white aerials of Guin I found were colorized the ground scouring might be quite visible from the air. Given the scar across the landscape that Guin from more or less the start of its path to when it exited out of the forest areas I have a feeling there was a long, narrow and deep swath of scoured topsoil and vegetation that was in the area for years.

 

[A Guy]

Also, did the tornado really touch down right at the edge of the city limits or had it traveled quite a bit before reaching Xenia?

A fair way, about seven miles from the TA track. It grew rapidly wider as it reached the city though. Fujita did an analysis which showed it varied dramatically in pace at the point the greatest damage was done, which is interesting if coincidental.

 

[pohnpei]

Yeah that’s the one. The foreground shows nothing but bare soil with all surface vegetation removed. I honestly can’t think of any photos from Hackleburg-Phil Campbell that show anything quite like that, unless it’s something I haven’t seen yet.

I think this was posted a few times but apparently Hackleburg did very significant scouring inside town. Once grassfield turned into bare muddy field in a blink of eye. The damage in Hackleburg area was probably more impressive than most people think about.
Significant scouring also occurred before entering the town
this video around 2:52 showed it

 

[locomusic01]

Xenia also reminds me of Barrie, where there was a visible streak for a very brief period before quickly weakening (yeah, Barrie was likely more violent). I can understand the F5 rating for the Arrowhead subdivisions. Also, did the tornado really touch down right at the edge of the city limits or had it traveled quite a bit before reaching Xenia?

Yeah I dunno why it's labeled like that - the tornado touched down south of Bellbrook, almost 9 miles SW of Xenia.

 

[locomusic01]

That first photo. Wow. some of the most textbook debris granulation I’ve seen.

Yeah, that's looking over the swath of debris on Pawnee Trail in front of Arrowwood Elementary.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Yeah I dunno why it's labeled like that - the tornado touched down south of Bellbrook, almost 9 miles SW of Xenia.

My guess is the map was labeled with the tornado touching down right outside of Xenia because it was made before the full survey could was completed and they were simply going off eyewitness accounts.
Also the more I find damage photographs from this outbreak the more it's clear that a lot of the F4/5s fully deserved their rankings, it was just hard to find photographs of the hardest hit areas until relatively recently. I do Xenia deserved its F5 rating, even if it achieved that intensity for a brief time (or maybe it was weakening as it went through the city)?

 

[locomusic01]

Xenia deserved its rating for the small swath around/west of the US-35 bypass IMO. It had all the classic hallmarks - debris granulation, intense wind rowing, some pretty intense vehicle & vegetation damage, a bunch of homes swept cleanly away (even if most weren't built to modern EF5 standards), a pretty high concentration of fatalities in the F5 area, etc.

At the same time, I understand why it's gotten kinda downplayed in recent years because it was initially hyped up as at least the most violent tornado of the outbreak, if not one of the most violent ever, which it definitely wasn't. It just received more attention and hype than it deserved because it hit a large-ish city and was highly photographed and whatnot.

 

[A Guy]

My guess is the map was labeled with the tornado touching down right outside of Xenia because it was made before the full survey could was completed and they were simply going off eyewitness accounts.

Simpler, that's where it's first obvious in the aerial picture. I'd be interested to see if there's any ground markings underneath that label actually.

 

[Lake Martin EF4]

Also, I once had a black and white photo of the Vancouver tornado itself saved, but now I can't find it unfortunately. It was a large, ragged-looking stovepipe type tornado.

Hmmmmmmmmmm

MSN

EDIT: nope, it's from the Tornado! Documentary from 1967

EDIT 2: combing the Wayback Machine, @Juliett Bravo Kilo or @buckeye05 do you recall what page the Vancouver photo you found was on the old forum? I've currently found an Enigma Outbreak map by Loco on Page 50.

EDIT 3: I'm pretty sure that the photo isn't of Vancouver because all the descriptions imply a rain wrapped tornado in a squall line. You usually don't see squall line tornadoes photographed because usually they're wrapped in rain, and this seems to be no exception.

 

[Steel Central]

These are all from Northern Alabama (mostly Madison County), but they didn't include any specific location info:

Think I got locations for 4-6
#4 is looking SE at what is currently the Wood Perfect/Clayton Homes site (was this the infamous boat plant?). Supported by Saw Mill Rd. across the top of the screen crossing the doubletrack rails through town
#5 is just NE of that in the heart of Western Guin. Evident by the "main drag" US-278 in the top left corner, and 12th St. curving in the photos center.
#6 is looking south at Tanner, on US-31 just south of the Brownsferry Rd. cross section. The road branching off at bottom right is Leonard Cir, and the frontage roads are Pitts Blvd. and McMeans Blvd.

The 2 Guin ones were easy with the towns road layout but the Tanner one I had to scour expressways around there for, and luckily this is the one place with that built-up of a frontage road.


also hi this is my first post, I've read through the entire thread many times and it's a treasure.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Think I got locations for 4-6
#4 is looking SE at what is currently the Wood Perfect/Clayton Homes site (was this the infamous boat plant?). Supported by Saw Mill Rd. across the top of the screen crossing the doubletrack rails through town
#5 is just NE of that in the heart of Western Guin. Evident by the "main drag" US-278 in the top left corner, and 12th St. curving in the photos center.
#6 is looking south at Tanner, on US-31 just south of the Brownsferry Rd. cross section. The road branching off at bottom right is Leonard Cir, and the frontage roads are Pitts Blvd. and McMeans Blvd.

The 2 Guin ones were easy with the towns road layout but the Tanner one I had to scour expressways around there for, and luckily this is the one place with that built-up of a frontage road.


also hi this is my first post, I've read through the entire thread many times and it's a treasure.

What do you think about the photographs of the downed/mangled transmission towers? Are those from Tanner or Guin? One of those tornadoes is reputed to have done stuff like that.

 

[locomusic01]

Think I got locations for 4-6
#4 is looking SE at what is currently the Wood Perfect/Clayton Homes site (was this the infamous boat plant?). Supported by Saw Mill Rd. across the top of the screen crossing the doubletrack rails through town
#5 is just NE of that in the heart of Western Guin. Evident by the "main drag" US-278 in the top left corner, and 12th St. curving in the photos center.
#6 is looking south at Tanner, on US-31 just south of the Brownsferry Rd. cross section. The road branching off at bottom right is Leonard Cir, and the frontage roads are Pitts Blvd. and McMeans Blvd.

The 2 Guin ones were easy with the towns road layout but the Tanner one I had to scour expressways around there for, and luckily this is the one place with that built-up of a frontage road.


also hi this is my first post, I've read through the entire thread many times and it's a treasure.

Nice job, thanks! There were originally accompanying pdfs with each set of photos describing exactly where each one was taken + what it shows, but unfortunately those too are locked up in TTU's archives. IIRC the photos were all listed as being from Madison County, but the listings weren't terribly accurate for any of them.

 

[locomusic01]

So I finally got one of the batches of Niles, OH photos I've been waiting for forever. Unfortunately they're pretty low resolution and most aren't really anything like what the guy described. Still, I'll finish sorting through them when I can and post anything worth posting here. In better news, I also got a new photo of the tornado:

I haven't had a chance to try and find the exact location yet, but I'm told it was taken when the tornado was around North Rd/Woodglen Ave. That'd be just moments before it crossed Mosquito Creek and started hulking out, reaching F4+ intensity on Cynthia Ct. and continuing to intensify on through Niles Park Plaza.

 

[Steel Central]

What do you think about the photographs of the downed/mangled transmission towers? Are those from Tanner or Guin? One of those tornadoes is reputed to have done stuff like that.

I'd guess Tanner since thats in the Browns Ferry vicinity. Theres a few spots around that have similar terrain to the photo, but Google Maps only has cruddy 2009 coverage when you get up to where the power lines are now.

 

[locomusic01]

I've got a folder full of photos I need to sort through sometime so there might be some stuff from Indiana in there, but yeah, it dissipated fairly quickly. It apparently did totally demolish at least a couple of homes north of the river, though.

Okay, got a chance to look through that folder a bit and I do have a handful of photos from the Indiana side of the river (near Morvin's Landing/Mauckport). Mostly from one particular property nearest the river, which clearly wasn't among the hardest-hit areas, but they're the only photos I can ever recall seeing from that section of the path.

 

[MNTornadoGuy]

There was a post awhile back in the thread about a tornado in the Plateau State of Nigeria on May 13, 2022 of last year. I found some more damage photos from the event on Facebook. It devastated the village of Makundang in the Bokkos LGA. Over 50 homes were destroyed but there doesn't seem to have been any fatalities thankfully. Looks like it could have possibly produced F2 damage.

Spoiler: Facebook Post Links

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1144119729091831/?multi_permalinks=1779139688923162&hoisted_section_header_type=recently_seen&__cft__[0]=AZWo5xMyiLQmwETZWC9wKz6yWgRs0hVuSnemX2Fjxu8pqieIss8JSG31UclHRUPN_Y4i9m6TY9ZsXxAlpVAZirAV3mBL7BU3H6cxWeVYLzmfKns1nDZIS1fXgV4xrTvyBcYbmVTBEkvsNGx1YohcmXHG&__tn__=,O,P-R

Satellite imagery of the storm (the one in central Nigeria near Abuja) that likely produced the tornado:

 

[pohnpei]

Think I got locations for 4-6
#4 is looking SE at what is currently the Wood Perfect/Clayton Homes site (was this the infamous boat plant?). Supported by Saw Mill Rd. across the top of the screen crossing the doubletrack rails through town
#5 is just NE of that in the heart of Western Guin. Evident by the "main drag" US-278 in the top left corner, and 12th St. curving in the photos center.
#6 is looking south at Tanner, on US-31 just south of the Brownsferry Rd. cross section. The road branching off at bottom right is Leonard Cir, and the frontage roads are Pitts Blvd. and McMeans Blvd.

The 2 Guin ones were easy with the towns road layout but the Tanner one I had to scour expressways around there for, and luckily this is the one place with that built-up of a frontage road.


also hi this is my first post, I've read through the entire thread many times and it's a treasure.

Oh wow. So pic 4/5 were probably the clearest pics I've seen yet of Guin. And it support the assumption that it had a very narrow core so it can do damage like locomusic01 posted before and the feature of very narrow core all partially accounted for the unbelievable scouring it did with such fast speed.

 

[buckeye05]

Hmmmmmmmmmm

MSN

EDIT: nope, it's from the Tornado! Documentary from 1967

EDIT 2: combing the Wayback Machine, @Juliett Bravo Kilo or @buckeye05 do you recall what page the Vancouver photo you found was on the old forum? I've currently found an Enigma Outbreak map by Loco on Page 50.

EDIT 3: I'm pretty sure that the photo isn't of Vancouver because all the descriptions imply a rain wrapped tornado in a squall line. You usually don't see squall line tornadoes photographed because usually they're wrapped in rain, and this seems to be no exception.

Yeah that’s not the photo unfortunately. The one I saw was apparently a screen capture of some video taken of the tornado. It actually looked like someone took a photo of a tv screen. There were those horizontal “line” artifacts that you get when you take a pic of one of those really old school TVs while they’re on. But saying that it probably wasn’t real because most QLCS are rain wrapped isn’t a fair deduction. It happens more than people realize. In fact, the one that hit my old neighborhood in 2015 had a fully condensed funnel, despite being embedded in a tiny squall line and hardly visible on radar.

But yeah, it was a photo I haven’t seen before of since, looked to be in the right setting, was in an article about that tornado, and labeled specifically mentioning that it was a photo of the Vancouver tornado itself, captured from a brief video that was taken that day. It very much seemed legit to me.

 

[buckeye05]

More:

The rest of the photos I was able to get were all from Xenia. Not really anything we haven't seen before, but I'll post them in a bit anyway.

Sorry to rewind a bunch, but that last photo….
Are we looking at debarked shrubbery/vegetation here?