Juliett Bravo Kilo
Member
Perhaps you'll answer this in your article, but do you know the most reliable estimate for how many trees this thing downed? Grazulis says 88,000 but I don't think that's right given that this thing went through nothing but dense forest for ~70 miles and the 1987 Yellowstone tornado had a path length of only 24 miles but managed to down a million trees or so.Moshannon? It's hard to say just because there were so few manmade structures in the path. It definitely did violent damage in the Winterburn/Penfield area, which is pretty impressive since that was only a few miles after touchdown. That was before it exploded in size though, and after that point I actually wasn't able to find any substantial, well-built structures that it struck directly. It damaged a bunch of camps and hunting cabins and totally demolished some of them, but they weren't exactly the sturdiest of buildings from what I can tell.
I didn't find a ton of evidence of debarking, ground scouring, etc. but I'm not sure you'd even expect to see that in such thickly forested areas. One thing that does seem fairly impressive to me is that it passed through a few areas of old-growth hardwood forest with very large, mature trees and still managed to virtually clear-cut them. I spoke with a man who did some surveys for the state DCNR after the tornado and he said there was an area in Clinton County in particular where, to paraphrase, there was nothing left standing above roughly head height in a large grove of old-growth hemlock. That takes some pretty serious power.
..Which I guess is all a very long-winded way of saying that I haven't come across anything to suggest it was extremely violent, but I'm not entirely certain I would have even if it was. My own personal opinion is that it probably was capable of producing a huge swath of strong damage and likely spotty areas of violent, but its peak intensity wasn't really what made it so remarkable. I'd say there were likely a half-dozen other tornadoes that day that were more violent based on the evidence that's available.
This article claims the tornado devastated 10,024 acres and caused 5 million in timber damage, and also claims it demolished 76 miles of trails and closed 22 miles of state roads. Perhaps the 76 is a typo but the rest of the statistics seem accurate, not entirely sure.