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locomusic01

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I appreciate it, Phil! I know next to nothing about video so I have no idea if I can actually pull off what I'm envisioning, but I figure it's worth a shot. I really like the idea of being able to tell a story more visually. Among other things, it makes it a lot easier to keep events in sequence and gives you a much better sense of things spatially.

Speaking of spatially, I'm not even done plotting all the deaths for New Richmond yet, but the sheer density is already staggering:

OIkj8aH.jpg


It's hard to tell since a bunch of the markers overlap, but that's 81 fatalities in less than a tenth of a square mile - and I believe there are at least another 20-25 I still need to add to this area. In fact, the vast majority of the deaths occurred within the two blocks of Knowles Ave (Main St) between 1st & 3rd - an area less than 300 yards long and 100 yards wide. Easily one of the greatest concentrations of tornado fatalities in history.
 
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I appreciate it, Phil! I know next to nothing about video so I have no idea if I can actually pull off what I'm envisioning, but I figure it's worth a shot. I really like the idea of being able to tell a story more visually. Among other things, it makes it a lot easier to keep events in sequence and gives you a much better sense of things spatially.

Speaking of spatially, I'm not even done plotting all the deaths for New Richmond yet, but the sheer density is already staggering:

OIkj8aH.jpg


It's hard to tell since a bunch of the markers overlap, but that's 81 fatalities in less than a tenth of a square mile - and I believe there are at least another 20-25 I still need to add to this area. In fact, the vast majority of the deaths occurred within the two blocks of Knowles Ave (Main St) between 1st & 3rd - an area less than 300 yards long and 100 yards wide. Easily one of the greatest concentrations of tornado fatalities in history.
I'd say this tornado is on par with Tupelo and Flint-Beecher in terms of density of fatalities.
Did you ever try plotting out Tupelo? That thing had some instances of homes of up to 13 people being killed.
 

locomusic01

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I'd say this tornado is on par with Tupelo and Flint-Beecher in terms of density of fatalities.
Did you ever try plotting out Tupelo? That thing had some instances of homes of up to 13 people being killed.
Yeah, the Burrough family. What an awful story. One of their neighbors also lost 6 family members and another family of four was killed a few houses down.

Anyway, I marked a bunch of places where multiple people were killed while I was making my map but I never fully plotted everything out. Same deal w/Beecher. Back then I had enough sense not to get myself into that lol
 

pohnpei

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Yeah, the Burrough family. What an awful story. One of their neighbors also lost 6 family members and another family of four was killed a few houses down.

Anyway, I marked a bunch of places where multiple people were killed while I was making my map but I never fully plotted everything out. Same deal w/Beecher. Back then I had enough sense not to get myself into that lol
Tupelo is basically what happens when you take Smithville and put it through a town with its full population at home instead of out at work and going through the area at night. A nightmare scenario.
 

locomusic01

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Posted this in the missing tornado videos thread but I’ll post it here too since it’s a significant tornado event. Bill Reid’s video of Spencer, remastered in 1080p60 from the original Hi8 tape:

Man, that looks fantastic! The structure/motion is fascinating, especially in the wider shots.
 

TH2002

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Spencer is a tornado I honestly feel had F5 potential at some point during its lifecycle, and may have even deserved a low end F5 rating, granted many of the structures in town were poorly built. It's also possible that the tornado didn't hit any F5-capable DI's, but I tried to figure some things out:
Spencer-SD-aerial-diagram.JPG
The Spencer Apartments are immediately out of frame at bottom right. Downtown Spencer bore a direct hit. One small building (probably the post office), the fire station, and two larger buildings were all destroyed completely. Another small building probably similar in construction to the post office (next to the green tents) was also left as a bare slab, albeit much closer to the edge of or just outside of the damage core. The survey report specifically says the post office and fire station were bolted to their foundations, though the fire station was essentially lifted off its foundation intact and the fire trucks parked inside were hardly moved (it probably lacked interior walls). The two large buildings nearby were leveled, and one of them was partially swept clean. According to the same survey report, well built stores were completely destroyed in Spencer, so that is possibly what those buildings were? No way to confirm unfortunately.

The Spencer water tower (labeled) collapsed after its supports were undercut by a sedan and other debris. The tornado's inner core started to make a right turn around that time, and most of the rest of the intense damage was confined to the northeastern part of town. Some homes (albeit likely of questionable construction) and a large warehouse were swept away, with many more homes leveled. Some wind rowing was evident in this part of town and in the area where the tornado exited Spencer. A large grove of trees was annihilated just outside of town:
90
 
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I haven't really seen anything clearly F5-worthy from Spencer, although part of that may just be the fact that it's not especially well-documented. It's on my ever-growing list to someday dig up some more stuff on - this is about all I've got besides the photos you posted.

qS4W6Oa.jpg


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The water tower being toppled reminds me of Greensburg but that kind of old design isn't that difficult to topple, modern day water towers are much more difficult to topple over which is what one of the things that made Mayfield so impressive.
Also the intact car next to the water tower at that angle reminds me of that pic from one of the Carolinas 1984 tornadoes. I have a feeling Spencer would've been rated F5 if it had occurred in the 70s or 80s as they were definitely much more lenient about what qualified as an F5 compared to nowadays.
 
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Good to see Spencer getting some attention on here. It got a good bit of coverage in some late '90s tornado documentaries (alongside 5/3/99, it was one of the major scientific coups for the original DOW program) but was otherwise quickly overshadowed by subsequent events. I mainly remember it for the tornadic supercell being one of the seeds for the monster Great Lakes derecho that night into the following day, which was one of the most violent ever documented (with widespread ≥100 MPH gusts recorded, perhaps not eclipsed in that regard until 8/10/2020) as well as being extremely long-tracked from Minnesota across Wisconsin, lower Michigan, southern Ontario into western New York.
 

locomusic01

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So I finally had a few hours to mess around w/After Effects and get a better sense of whether I can even do the sort of project I'm envisioning. The good news? I think it should be pretty manageable once I get my bearings. The bad news? Holy crap it's so easy to get carried away.

I started out by trying to throw together a quick newspaper animation (which didn't turn out how I wanted, but good enough for practice):



..And before I'd even fully figured that out I was looking up all sorts of super-advanced plugins and whatnot that I have no idea why I'd ever need lol

Anyway, found something pretty wild a few days ago on New Richmond. I knew there were train cars on the northeast side of town that had been picked up off the tracks and thrown around, but apparently some of them were literally torn open/apart. One also had a beam (not sure if iron or steel - accounts differ) driven straight through both sides, basically pinning it to the ground. The beam reportedly came from the wagon bridge that was blown away at the north end of the business district. There are lots of pictures of the bridge, but I'm hoping there are also some of the train cars out there somewhere.
 
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So I finally had a few hours to mess around w/After Effects and get a better sense of whether I can even do the sort of project I'm envisioning. The good news? I think it should be pretty manageable once I get my bearings. The bad news? Holy crap it's so easy to get carried away.

I started out by trying to throw together a quick newspaper animation (which didn't turn out how I wanted, but good enough for practice):



..And before I'd even fully figured that out I was looking up all sorts of super-advanced plugins and whatnot that I have no idea why I'd ever need lol

Anyway, found something pretty wild a few days ago on New Richmond. I knew there were train cars on the northeast side of town that had been picked up off the tracks and thrown around, but apparently some of them were literally torn open/apart. One also had a beam (not sure if iron or steel - accounts differ) driven straight through both sides, basically pinning it to the ground. The beam reportedly came from the wagon bridge that was blown away at the north end of the business district. There are lots of pictures of the bridge, but I'm hoping there are also some of the train cars out there somewhere.

I know Joplin tore massive shipping containers in half so freight cars being torn in half doesn't surprise me anymore (crazy, I know). New Richmond somewhat reminds me of Joplin in terms of an F5 going through a densely populated urban area at the worst possible time.
 

Marshal79344

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Hey guys, it's been a while since I've posted here. Anyways, with any old major tornadic event (especially before the 1930s), the photographic documentation, which is key in discerning super-overhyped newspaper articles from the actual truth, becomes quite scarce. New Richmond is one of the few exceptions to this, with multiple photos taken around the city showing clear-cut F5 damage in multiple locations. I've noticed that old photographers of tornado damage tended to focus on what was still standing, rather than take a photo of a site that had been wiped out so completely that there was nothing worth photographing to begin with. The fact that multiple images taken in and around New Richmond still show high-end vegetation damage and complete destruction to multiple homes is a simple testament to its amazing strength and violence. Here's some photos I have on standby.

General view of ruined New Richmond district. There used to be homes behind the grove of trees at the right hand side of this photograph.

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Complete tree debarking and major granulation of debris.

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Men comb a bunch of destroyed structures for survivors and bodies.

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A young man tries to make sense of the horrific tragedy that has unfolded around him.

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Puzzled men observe a "freak of the cyclone". The term "freak of the cyclone" was used to describe unusual and incredible tornado-caused phenomena, such as this metal pole that was twisted and thrown into the side of a debarked tree.

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Business district before the storm

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Business district after the storm. Given how many businesses were completely wiped out here, it's no surprise that most of the fatalities occurred in this area. Not to forget that the tornado came on the day of the Circus, where more than normal people were inside the town.

1662520054787.png
 

locomusic01

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I know Joplin tore massive shipping containers in half so freight cars being torn in half doesn't surprise me anymore (crazy, I know). New Richmond somewhat reminds me of Joplin in terms of an F5 going through a densely populated urban area at the worst possible time.
Yeah, some of the photos are pretty reminiscent of Joplin - just vast swaths of ground-up debris stretching across what had been (relatively) heavily developed neighborhoods. The bank vaults in New Richmond - the only things left standing of the town's two major banks - also brought Joplin to mind.

XMl3oVY.jpg


xzrqIp9.jpg


XwBju7F.jpg
 

locomusic01

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General view of ruined New Richmond district. There used to be homes behind the grove of trees at the right hand side of this photograph.

View attachment 15048
And not just homes - some of the "finest" homes in the city. This is looking ENE along 1st St. just east of the wagon bridge, which is one of the neighborhoods where some of the town's wealthiest residents lived. The railroad cars I mentioned would've been parked (..is that the right term for train cars? I've never thought about that lol) in the distance sort of behind that heap of wreckage on the left. What's crazy is that this isn't even the core of the damage path - it's more toward the left side of the track.
 
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