Juliett Bravo Kilo
Member
At 4:10 I saw a large brown splotch swirl around the funnel for a bit, pretty crazy. I would love to find a photograph of the 200-foot section of grass that was scoured away at a pasture, leaving only bare soil behind that Grazulis mentioned.The crazy thing is that it wasn’t an object though. Dense southern soil just seems to scour in that odd, patchy pattern.
I think you can actually see the scouring taking place in the video you posted. There are several points where there appears to be an “explosion” of dirt that violently spirals around the funnel. I strongly suspect that what we’re seeing there is the ground literally failing and being thrown into the air by extremely intense suction vortices.
Interesting little note, it was once thought to be a single, long-tracked tornado but in 2013 it was determined to be from a family of 3 tornadoes, the other two being F4s. The first and third were F4, the second was the F5. The 3 fatalities originally attributed to the F5 were actually caused by the first tornado of the family, the first F4 that tracked through Hardin and Wayne counties. This is a photograph of it that is often incorrectly identified as being of the Wayne/Lawrence County F5.
Source: https://www.weather.gov/ohx/19980416 (you'll have to scroll down a bit):