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J-Rab

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I found an engineering study about damage from the Tri-State tornado in Murphysboro, De Soto, some rural areas, and West Frankfort. It included examples of extreme damage that I'll list below;
Orient Mine, West Frankfort
- A Buick roadster was carried ~200 ft and demolished.
- One 60,000 gallon steel water tank that was anchored with bolts was blown away. One of the steel bearing plates supporting the water tower was bent upwards at a 45-degree angle while another one was twisted.
- A 20-ton locomotive crane was lifted off its tracks and laid against a building.
- A "Cyclone fence" was bent.
- An overhead conveyor was totally destroyed with some of its concrete piers being pulled out of the ground.

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Peabody Mine 18, West Frankfort
- A steel pier of a mining tipple was torn completely out of the ground and hurled 45 ft away.

Rural Areas
- An Illinois Central steel railroad bridge over the Big Muddy River (that weighed over 100 tons) was moved 8 inches while a nearby pump house was completely swept away.
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Very nice find. The pic of that fence is wild.
 
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That is the only picture of the Smithville tornado that I’ve seen. I wish there were more. I have seen one video of it as well, and you can tell just how crazy fast that thing was moving.

There is just not much out there from that storm.
Best article with all videos of the tornado compiled at the bottom:


Also check this out, the formation video of it, nothing spectacular but interesting. Quite eerie hearing the videographer mention it's heading straight toward Smithville:

 
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Yeah, I had what you had... which was the first half page of the AL tornadoes tagged on to the end of the MS one’s, so I looked all over the place until I finally found the rest of the report, haha. It was in a place where you could put in the month and year to get that months reports going back to the late 1800’s.
Can you show me the link to this place with MWR reports that go back to the late 1800s?
 
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Supposedly this photograph is of damage from Goliad: https://devastatingdisasters.com/goliad-tornado-texas-may-18-1902/

This is an interesting news story that contains several photographs of damage from the Goliad, TX tornado of 1902 that killed at least 114 people, tied with Waco of 1953 for deadliest tornado in the state. Some of the damage looks quite intense:

 

J-Rab

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Can you show me the link to this place with MWR reports that go back to the late 1800s?
When you click on the link, it will take you to a single issue, even though I saved the link on the page with all of the years listed. Why, I don’t know.

Once you get to that page, a little ways down you’ll see:

Early Online Releases —- Latest Issue—- All Volumes and Issues—- Most Cited

Like four tabs side by side.

Click on “All Volumes and Issues”.

That will take you to all of the volumes (years). Scroll down to the year that you want and on the far right you will see a ^ that you click on to expand that particular year. Once you do that, it will expand to show issues 1-12 (1=January.....12=December).

Volume 1 is all 12 issues of 1873. So you will be able to see any month from Jan 1873 to now.

Here‘s the link:

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/mwre/mwre-overview.xml?contents=all-volumes


EDIT: Well it looks like it did save on the page with all the years listed... so that will make it easier.
 
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I found an engineering study about damage from the Tri-State tornado in Murphysboro, De Soto, some rural areas, and West Frankfort. It included examples of extreme damage that I'll list below;
Orient Mine, West Frankfort
- A Buick roadster was carried ~200 ft and demolished.
- One 60,000 gallon steel water tank that was anchored with bolts was blown away. One of the steel bearing plates supporting the water tower was bent upwards at a 45-degree angle while another one was twisted.
- A 20-ton locomotive crane was lifted off its tracks and laid against a building.
- A "Cyclone fence" was bent.
- An overhead conveyor was totally destroyed with some of its concrete piers being pulled out of the ground.

content
content
content


Peabody Mine 18, West Frankfort
- A steel pier of a mining tipple was torn completely out of the ground and hurled 45 ft away.

Rural Areas
- An Illinois Central steel railroad bridge over the Big Muddy River (that weighed over 100 tons) was moved 8 inches while a nearby pump house was completely swept away.
content


Holy crap, that is an incredible source, so many of those photographs I've never seen before and are quite impressive.
Also, finally found the source of my avatar lol.
 

buckeye05

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Sorry to derail the subject, but is anyone else unable to see damage pics when using the Damage Assessment Toolkit since the update? I’m seriously upset at the idea that they could have possibly done away with DAT damage pics. It’s an extremely important resource to have publicly available.
 

MNTornadoGuy

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Sorry to derail the subject, but is anyone else unable to see damage pics when using the Damage Assessment Toolkit since the update? I’m seriously upset at the idea that they could have possibly done away with DAT damage pics. It’s an extremely important resource to have publicly available.
I have been able to see them, look under attachments, the images should be there.
 

MNTornadoGuy

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A little-known but intense Canadian tornado is the 1977 St. Malo Manitoba F4. This tornado was reportedly up to a mile-wide and produced some very intense damage. Asphalt was scoured from a highway, one home was completely swept away, a 20-ft steel grain bin was reportedly found four miles away, dump-trucks and a road-grader were thrown across a road and intense ground scouring occurred as vegetables were torn out of the ground.
man2.pngman.png
(I have more pictures but TalkWeather doesn't want to load them)
 

MNTornadoGuy

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What was probably one of the most intense tornadoes in Ontario history was the 1979 Woodstock. This massive and extremely violent F4 wedge tore through the city of Woodstock and rural farmland SE of the city. Steel transmission towers were flattened and twisted like noodles, cropland was severely scoured, a semi-truck was mangled, 440-pound granite gravestones tossed several yards, homes completely swept away and trees were severely debarked.



tspa_0015842f.jpg
 

pohnpei

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I've been informed all along that the Granbury TX tornado 2013 has been rated 180mph which is quite clear on NWS website.
But I can also find a host of news at that time reported that this tornado has been rated 200mph.
And KML also showed two houses in the small town has been rated 200mph.The house in the pic below does seem pretty well anchored and the trees behind the house was largely debarked. So I am some kind of confused about the rating of this tornado. Does some know why this inconsistency exist and did this tornado worth the EF5 or very high end EF4 rating?
6UoqWZuD_1368715549608.jpg
QQ截图20201220151903.png
 
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Marshal79344

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I'm not sure why that exists for Granbury. Similar things have existed with Chapman 2016 and Bennington. However Granbury was definitely a violent tornado, that's for sure.
 

pohnpei

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I'm not sure why that exists for Granbury. Similar things have existed with Chapman 2016 and Bennington. However Granbury was definitely a violent tornado, that's for sure.
Bennington 2013 was downgraded from EF4 to EF3 so maybe KML didn't update after its final rating.
Chapman 2016 was a little comfusing. But the 200mph rating mentioned by NCDC for that house alone sounds more reasonable to me(very well built house, bolted down to poured concrete foundation. Sill plate moved and foundation also cracked.The utterly extreme contextual damage around was needless to say.)
For Granbury, I never heard that it has been downgraded from 200 to 180 or upgraded from 180 to 200. There were only four EF4 rating houses inside the town and the tornado itself was a slow mover(2.5miles in 13 mins) , which may add some extent of uncertainty to the intensity judging.


Honestly, to me, the video apperance of the tornado was not that impressive in comparison with other violent stovepipe tornados but I know it's not objective and evidential to judge tornado intensity by video apperance.
 
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Austin Dawg

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That is the only picture of the Smithville tornado that I’ve seen. I wish there were more. I have seen one video of it as well, and you can tell just how crazy fast that thing was moving.

There is just not much out there from that storm.


TView attachment 5409hanks. I hadn't looked that far back in the thread. Here are a couple more photos from April 27, 2011. The first is the Smithville tornado. The second is from the Hackleburg EF5.


A small town that luckily had the majority of people were at work. It also was very quick and struck the least populated side of town on the west side of HWY 25. It hit so suddenly and went through the town in about 10 seconds.˜

If it had struck east of 25 you would have had double or triple the fatalities.

Here are a couple of other videos.





This video was from the daughter of a friend of mine who has been a big help with information on the tornado. Her daughter was in Amory and drove to the boat ramp there on the Tenn/Tom Waterway. It is about 5-7 miles directly south of Smithville. The storm had already hit New Wren and was recycling just moments before it hit Smithville. This footage is at the beginning of the video and then she drives into Smithville moments after it hit. She deleted the audio because her daughter knew her family was there and was understandably very upset. This is the only footage I know of that captures the storm forming the F5 life of the tornado.

 
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