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Significant Tornado Events

CheeselandSkies said:
I wonder, was Richard Bomboy recording on his video feed of the touchdown of the Albion tornado? Kind of a shame if he wasn't.
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locomusic01 said:
There's also a guy who lived several miles SW of Albion - he was paralyzed, but he was a Skywarn spotter and he used this video camera mounted to an antenna to scan the skies. Anyway, he caught the tornado right around the time it was rapidly intensifying and apparently the camera was recording. Only problem is he died several years ago and his son said he has no idea where the tape is, assuming he even kept it.
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EDIT: Ninja'd
 
Lake Martin EF4 said:
EDIT: Ninja'd
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party ex GIF
 
Speaking of Albion, a woman snapped a series of photos of the tornado roping out northeast of Cranesville. They were used in a local newspaper at the time but no one seems to know where they are now:

7uQSNTK.jpg


There are definitely photos out there from Albion as well, and possibly also further southwest where it was likely at peak intensity. The librarian in Albion said there are lots of photos she plans to digitize at some point, so I'm somewhat cautiously optimistic that there might be some in there.
 
locomusic01 said:
Speaking of Albion, a woman snapped a series of photos of the tornado roping out northeast of Cranesville. They were used in a local newspaper at the time but no one seems to know where they are now:

7uQSNTK.jpg


There are definitely photos out there from Albion as well, and possibly also further southwest where it was likely at peak intensity. The librarian in Albion said there are lots of photos she plans to digitize at some point, so I'm somewhat cautiously optimistic that there might be some in there.
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Some from Cranesville. I'm kinda surprised the only Albion tornado photo in your article is one that looks like an aged photo of a cloudy day.
 
andyhb said:
This is some truly remarkable stuff.
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Thanks Andy!

Lake Martin EF4 said:
Some from Cranesville. I'm kinda surprised the only Albion tornado photo in your article is one that looks like an aged photo of a cloudy day.
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Yeah, I had to take Karen Teudhope's photos (there's a series of them) out of my article because I found that they weren't actually from Albion as they're almost always labeled. They're from a tornado that struck on 6/22 in nearby Beaver Center. I think Paul Medved's Cranesville photo is legit but I couldn't 100% confirm it.
 
Lake Martin EF4 said:
The 317 foot tall AT&T tower that was allegedly designed to withstand winds up to 200-300 mph, which was clipped and toppled into an unoccupied home?
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No AT&T towers are usually rated as F3 damage at the most and can fail far below those expected wind speeds due to vortex shedding. Also the contextual damage around the tower was not impressive.
 
MNTornadoGuy said:
I’ve heard that some people believe that the Atlantic tornado was an F5 but from the article I don’t see any evidence of damage that intense really.
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Yeah, I couldn't find much from the areas I most wanted to see photo-wise, probably in part because many of them are Amish properties and they apparently didn't much appreciate people flocking in with cameras.
 
A lot of the pictures and descriptions of the tornadoes are reminiscent of high-end Dixie and Plains outbreaks (some of the pictures of the Atlantic tornado in particular remind me of Cullman). That really was an incredibly anomalous event for the region.

NSSFC really done goofed by downgrading the outlook just before the outbreak began, but in fairness the SWODY1 wasn't really publicly disseminated the way it is now. Broadcast media outlets (at least those outside of highly tornado-prone markets like central Oklahoma) probably didn't share it verbatim with their audiences, and weather nerds couldn't pull it up on the Internet and blast it across multiple social media sites. To the extent that anyone in the affected region was paying attention that day, their awareness would have come from the issuance of the tornado watch.
 
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We've talked before about tornadoes with really tiny violent cores, and I think this photo from Evans City is a pretty cool illustration of that. You can see along the left edge where the tornado just went ham on a little grove of trees and then continued on across the field and over the hill. That tiny little section of completely demolished trees is like 30-ish yards wide. About 100 yards to the left of there was a house that only suffered like F1-F2 damage at most. And yet there was a business along the road below there that was totally leveled and a full-sized van was thrown up and over the other side of the hill in the center of the picture.

mars-evans-city-rd-debbie-clatworthy-rice.jpg


In the article I think I said the van was thrown (presumably, at least - no one could find any obvious impact/bounce marks) half a mile into a house, but it's actually a shade over six-tenths of a mile depending on exactly where the van was parked.

enyZWfn.png
 
Made a contoured map of Moshannon using modern day EF-Scale DI’s and information from the article. Im not sure if you can rate tornadoes EF4 based on tree damage alone, so came up with high end EF3+ 160 mph.
 

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locomusic01 said:
We've talked before about tornadoes with really tiny violent cores, and I think this photo from Evans City is a pretty cool illustration of that. You can see along the left edge where the tornado just went ham on a little grove of trees and then continued on across the field and over the hill. That tiny little section of completely demolished trees is like 30-ish yards wide. About 100 yards to the left of there was a house that only suffered like F1-F2 damage at most. And yet there was a business along the road below there that was totally leveled and a full-sized van was thrown up and over the other side of the hill in the center of the picture.

mars-evans-city-rd-debbie-clatworthy-rice.jpg


In the article I think I said the van was thrown (presumably, at least - no one could find any obvious impact/bounce marks) half a mile into a house, but it's actually a shade over six-tenths of a mile depending on exactly where the van was parked.

enyZWfn.png
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One thing that came through your article was how many tornadoes this day had tiny and extremely violent cores. Really something.
Also, the table of contents and interactive map is a fantastic idea that you should put into some of your older articles (especially Palm Sunday).
 
Juliett Bravo Kilo said:
One thing that came through your article was how many tornadoes this day had tiny and extremely violent cores. Really something.
Also, the table of contents and interactive map is a fantastic idea that you should put into some of your older articles (especially Palm Sunday).
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I dunno how well it'd work because some of my older articles skip around between different narratives/events, etc. but it's probably something I should look into. With this one I was sorta forced into keeping everything mostly discrete and self-contained just because there were so many tornadoes to cover and so many things happening at once. I do really like the general idea of using a ToC for easier navigation though.

Also, one of the reasons I wanted to go back and revisit Palm Sunday someday was to create an outbreak map like I did for this event. It was insanely time-consuming but I'm really, really happy with the results. I probably can't get as absurdly accurate/detailed for Palm Sunday anyway, especially in terms of adding the fatalities and whatnot, but on the other hand I'd already have a pretty decent head start w/the maps in Fujita's studies on the outbreak.

And actually I already did create a detailed map for Tupelo-Gainesville (obviously), and a bit more primitive one for Woodward (although I might have lost that when one of my old storage drives went down). Come to think of it, I created at least a rough map for Flint-Worcester too. Man, I hope I still have all that stuff somewhere. I gotta check later.

Edit: Yeah, it's really primitive but at least it'd be a start.

www.google.com

June 8-9, 1953: Flint - Worcester Outbreak - Google My Maps

June 8-9, 1953: Flint - Worcester Outbreak
www.google.com www.google.com

I apparently did lose the Google/KMZ stuff for Woodward, but I have the basic graphics I made, so that's something.

XTcKltQ.jpg
 
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As promised, here is some of the Super Outbreak stuff I've come across lately

Some assorted shots from Hackleburg and Phil Campbell
15956

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The Rainsville property where the ground covering a storm shelter was scoured away, partially exposing it
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View-of-Rainsville-residents-home-location-at-the-time-of-our-interview-July-2011-In.png


Mangled pickup truck from Tuscaloosa
Tuscaloosa-damage-truck.JPG

Cherokee Valley Rd in Ringgold
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I've been thinking a bit about what's next, but instead of narrowing down my options I've unsurprisingly ended up going in the opposite direction. I remembered that I'd started doing a bit of research on the May 19-21, 1957 outbreak sequence, which is really intriguing to me. Obviously Ruskin Heights is historic (and probably a bit underrated), but several of the other tornadoes were quite violent as well. IIRC, Grazulis tagged all three of the F4s (Concordia, KS; Rush City, MN; Fremont, MO) as "near-F5." Concordia also had a bunch of fairly significant satellites, which is pretty neat.

I've also wanted to tackle the 6/23/44 Appalachians outbreak for a long time. I've got quite a bit of material collected on Shinnston and Wellsburg-Chartiers and at least a little bit on the others, including the violent Belmont, WI F4 the day before. Feels like that might end up being a bigger project than I wanna take on right now though. Same deal with the 4/26/91 and 3/23/13 outbreaks.

Kinda like the idea of just focusing on a single tornado so I don't have to invest another full year into one article, but that really limits my options. Plainfield could be interesting and wouldn't be a huge project, I guess. New Richmond? Fergus Falls? Lubbock? I'm driving myself crazy already lol
 
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