Significant Tornado Events

[xJownage]

im not even gonna try to defend what nws paducah did for those tornadoes. they rated a large swept well bolted bolted duplex in bowling green mid range EF2 for crying out loud. and all the damage from those tornadoes proves that the scale needs major revision. either fix the scale too where it's not stupidly strict or remove the EF5 rating all together.

Pictures? Evidence? Or are we going to do this conjecture thing.

I agree the scale needs fixing, as the Vilonia rating pretty much broke the scale because it made every office question what an EF-5 even was. That being said, I've still seen no evidence about Paducah messing up this survey in any way. You want me to agree with you? Prove it.

 

[TH2002]

Damage from the 2/24/2001 Pontotoc, MS F3. This tornado killed six people.

 

[AngelAndHisWx]

Random question: in terms of non-traditional DIs, would straw embedded in a telephone pole be indicative of a strong (not necessarily violent) tornado?

 

[tornado examiner]

probably not...i've never seen pictures of anything less that a strong EF4 doing stuff like that...

 

[tornado examiner]

btw...when will the united states gov make it manditory to build homes on poured concrete slabs with anchore bolts?

 

[tornado examiner]

i wonder just how many structures sustained EF4 damage from the mayfield tornado. cause there's obviously alot more than what the nws listen on the dat...

 

[TH2002]

im not even gonna try to defend what nws paducah did for those tornadoes. they rated a large swept well bolted bolted duplex in bowling green mid range EF2 for crying out loud. and all the damage from those tornadoes proves that the scale needs major revision. either fix the scale too where it's not stupidly strict or remove the EF5 rating all together.

Bowling Green was NWS Louisville, not Paducah. And while I agree that Bowling Green absolutely should have been rated EF4 the low-balling by LMK speaks more volumes about their overly-conservative survey teams than the EF scale itself. Mayfield on the other hand DID expose a flaw with the scale (e.g. contextual damage in Bremen pointed to nothing but EF5 though the poor construction negated such a rating) and Paducah's survey could have been more thorough, but it's (sadly) far from the worst I've seen. If you want a true example of a craptastic damage survey then look no further than NWS Memphis' survey of the Holly Springs tornado.

 

[TH2002]

Tom G just added the 5/24/11 outbreak. Apparently he spent so long mulling over Joplin that he forgot about it.


3 F4, 1 F5. Chickasha and Goldsby stay EF4.

EDIT: Book's also releasing January 2, 2023.

I have to wonder what he could have been pondering over; hopefully not the EF5 rating because it's not really debatable that Joplin was an EF5.

Honestly, Vilonia is still the only one I have a real issue with. The rest I understand exactly why they were rated the way they were. The only other one I have any sort of strong feelings towards is Goldsby. Chapman, Tuscaloosa, and Mayfield are all well understood as to why an EF-5 rating wasn't given.

Personally I disagree about Chapman. I can live with Tuscaloosa and Mayfield (or any tornado where an F5/EF5 argument is at least fairly subjective) being official EF4's, but the arguments I've seen for keeping Chapman at EF4 are weak at best.

 

[tornado examiner]

Bowling Green was NWS Louisville, not Paducah. And while I agree that Bowling Green absolutely should have been rated EF4 the low-balling by LMK speaks more volumes about their overly-conservative survey teams than the EF scale itself. Mayfield on the other hand DID expose a flaw with the scale (e.g. contextual damage in Bremen pointed to nothing but EF5 though the poor construction negated such a rating) and Paducah's survey could have been more thorough, but it's (sadly) far from the worst I've seen. If you want a true example of a craptastic damage survey then look no further than NWS Memphis' survey of the Holly Springs tornado.

can you give me some examples of that? what did they do? i know it was another 170 mph EF4...

 

[tornado examiner]

i can somewhat confidently say that 200+mph winds occurred here. but of course...the construction quality of these buildings only warranted low end EF4 ratings....its a real shame that the EF-scale has become like this. under the F-scale this would have been rated F-5 in a heartbeat...but alas...this tornado will never get the justice and respect it deserves by officials...so much so that it'll probably never end up on Wikipedia's probable EF-5's list.

 

[TH2002]

can you give me some examples of that? what did they do? i know it was another 170 mph EF4...

See my previous post on it, but in short, most of the damage path just wasn't surveyed. The only portion of the damage path that WAS thoroughly surveyed, wasn't even done so by NWS Memphis.

Significant Tornado Events

Grazulis' possible basis for an EF4 rating for Lockett? There were 4 EF2 and 1 EF3 tornado in this outbreak so I think he just mislabled It as 4 EF3 and 1 EF4 imho.

talkweather.com

 

[tornado examiner]

See my previous post on it, but in short, most of the damage path just wasn't surveyed. The only portion of the damage path that WAS thoroughly surveyed, wasn't even done so by NWS Memphis.

Significant Tornado Events

Grazulis' possible basis for an EF4 rating for Lockett? There were 4 EF2 and 1 EF3 tornado in this outbreak so I think he just mislabled It as 4 EF3 and 1 EF4 imho.

talkweather.com

ooh...well thats just great...

 

[xJownage]

I have to wonder what he could have been pondering over; hopefully not the EF5 rating because it's not really debatable that Joplin was an EF5.


Personally I disagree about Chapman. I can live with Tuscaloosa and Mayfield (or any tornado where an F5/EF5 argument is at least fairly subjective) being official EF4's, but the arguments I've seen for keeping Chapman at EF4 are weak at best.

Have I not seen any pictures? I haven't seen any well constructed building photos on that one, I remember the tracks but I'm struggling to remember the details on that one.

View attachment 14863
i can somewhat confidently say that 200+mph winds occurred here. but of course...the construction quality of these buildings only warranted low end EF4 ratings....its a real shame that the EF-scale has become like this. under the F-scale this would have been rated F-5 in a heartbeat...but alas...this tornado will never get the justice and respect it deserves by officials...so much so that it'll probably never end up on Wikipedia's probable EF-5's list.

If you want to say that you have a problem with the SCALE, that's one thing and I can even agree with you on it. If you want to say the rating is wrong, you're saying that the scale was applied incorrectly, which is clearly not the case here.

You're taking issue to the scale, not the rating. One of those arguments is very fair, the other is objectively incorrect.

 

[MNTornadoGuy]

So this is potentially interesting. I've done a fair bit of research so far on the Herman, NE F4 from the day after New Richmond and it's safe to say it was very violent, but I found a new account today that caught my attention. It seems, at least according to this eyewitness, that the tornado tore sidewalks out of the ground in town and scattered them. That obviously raises a bunch of questions - what kind of sidewalks were they? how widespread was this phenomenon? were the sidewalks flush/nearly flush with the ground or just sitting on top of it? etc. - but it's not something I've encountered very often.

Actually, I ran into the same thing with New Richmond as well. Several accounts mention sidewalks being torn from the ground and hurled away, but again there are important details missing. I know in New Richmond the sidewalks were mostly all cut into the ground, but some were wood planks and some were concrete, and it's not really clear which ones were pulled out. I assume it was probably some of the wood sections, but who knows. Hopefully I can find some more info to clear it up.

Sidewalks are sorta visible in a few of the pictures from Herman and it looks like they might be concrete, but I really can't tell. Of course, the other thing is that damage accounts from this era (any era really, but especially this one) can be a bit.. creative lol. I tend not to put too much stock into things unless I can at least get multiple sources. At any rate, it's pretty intriguing if nothing else.

I’m guessing it was wooden plank sidewalks which were torn away as those were common in smaller towns during that era.

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

I have to wonder what he could have been pondering over; hopefully not the EF5 rating because it's not really debatable that Joplin was an EF5.


Personally I disagree about Chapman. I can live with Tuscaloosa and Mayfield (or any tornado where an F5/EF5 argument is at least fairly subjective) being official EF4's, but the arguments I've seen for keeping Chapman at EF4 are weak at best.

I hope that Grazulis doesn't buy into that "study" done by engineers that said all the damage in Joplin was no higher than EF3. If he does, I'm really worried about his judgment skills.

 

[Lake Martin EF4]

I have to wonder what he could have been pondering over; hopefully not the EF5 rating because it's not really debatable that Joplin was an EF5.

How to put it into the chart. It wasn't a major outbreak, but it'd feel like an insult to exclude it.

 

[TH2002]

Have I not seen any pictures? I haven't seen any well constructed building photos on that one, I remember the tracks but I'm struggling to remember the details on that one.

These photos have been posted before but I'll post them again for the sake of the argument:



These two homes along the path were well built and anchor bolted to their poured concrete basement foundations. The second home was not surveyed by NWS Topeka, but Tim Marshall gave it an EF4 rating due to "a lack of wall stud connections" (which COULD be a valid argument for a downgrade TBH, but honestly sounds a bit vague) while the first home had no structural flaws that were pointed out by Marshall or NWS Topeka. Literally the ONLY argument for a downgrade is that it wasn't a completely clean sweep as some of the debris remained next to the foundation. But it was regardless a well built two story brick home, sustained total removal of its bolted subflooring and the foundation was cracked:

All of this not even mentioning the EXTREME contextual damage this thing caused, including the rails (as you pointed out) and some of the highest-end damage to vehicles and farm machinery I have ever seen.

This also begs the question of just how clean a "clean sweep" home needs to be to be truly eligible for an EF5 rating; there are photos me and loco have posted before of a well built home in Joplin that also wasn't swept totally clean, but shrubbery in the front yard was completely shredded and debarked and scoured grass was plastered against the foundation. One of the EF5 candidate homes in Chickasha, and at least one of the homes that was rated EF5 in Moore also had some debris on the foundation, so does there have to be NO DEBRIS on or near a foundation to go with an EF5 rating, or does "swept clean" not have to mean swept COMPLETELY clean?

 

[Juliett Bravo Kilo]

Have I not seen any pictures? I haven't seen any well constructed building photos on that one, I remember the tracks but I'm struggling to remember the details on that one.

If you want to say that you have a problem with the SCALE, that's one thing and I can even agree with you on it. If you want to say the rating is wrong, you're saying that the scale was applied incorrectly, which is clearly not the case here.

You're taking issue to the scale, not the rating. One of those arguments is very fair, the other is objectively incorrect.

Chapman managed to rip the brick farmhouse from its foundation with such force that it tore away a small portion of the reinforced concrete basement foundation stemwall.

 

[xJownage]

Those are all good points, I hadn't seen most of those pictures as of yet. Hard to follow all 396 pages of this thread lol.

I think that's the main problem with the scale in general. It's trying to be objective when it realistically has to be subjective. "a lack of wall stud connections" sounds like a solid reasoning, but that doesn't explain the other home, or inconsistencies in where clean slab vs. semi-clean slab leads to different ratings.

 

[tornado examiner]

These photos have been posted before but I'll post them again for the sake of the argument:
View attachment 14865
View attachment 14867

These two homes along the path were well built and anchor bolted to their poured concrete basement foundations. The second home was not surveyed by NWS Topeka, but Tim Marshall gave it an EF4 rating due to "a lack of wall stud connections" (which COULD be a valid argument for a downgrade TBH, but honestly sounds a bit vague) while the first home had no structural flaws that were pointed out by Marshall or NWS Topeka. Literally the ONLY argument for a downgrade is that it wasn't a completely clean sweep as some of the debris remained next to the foundation. But it was regardless a well built two story brick home, sustained total removal of its bolted subflooring and the foundation was cracked:
View attachment 14868
All of this not even mentioning the EXTREME contextual damage this thing caused, including the rails (as you pointed out) and some of the highest-end damage to vehicles and farm machinery I have ever seen.

This also begs the question of just how clean a "clean sweep" home needs to be to be truly eligible for an EF5 rating; there are photos me and loco have posted before of a well built home in Joplin that also wasn't swept totally clean, but shrubbery in the front yard was completely shredded and debarked and scoured grass was plastered against the foundation. One of the EF5 candidate homes in Chickasha, and at least one of the homes that was rated EF5 in Moore also had some debris on the foundation, so does there have to be NO DEBRIS on or near a foundation to go with an EF5 rating, or does "swept clean" not have to mean swept COMPLETELY clean?

i hate that argument personally. so what if theres debris nearby the foundation? it doesnt disprove that 200+mph winds occured. it just shows that it was likely a pretty short but incredibly intense gust of wind that blew the house away but didn't last long enough to clear the area of debris. the debris argument holds little weight to me in most scenarios. its pretty vague as well...considering just how dynamic tornadic winds are.