Didn't really look through them so it may be stuff that's been posted here before, but I threw a bunch of 'em into an album. I'll check and see what else I have later and post whatever I missed:
The more I research this outbreak & read TornadoTalk article on it (haven't gotten to Tuscaloosa-Birmingham yet) it's pretty clear that there was way more EF5s then officially documented and that the sheer amount of tornadoes that occurred likely made objectively rating everything more difficult than normally.
I think 4/3/74 was insanely huge too (even more than we'll likely now) but the full extent of it has been lost to time due to not having 24/7/365 radar and such. Also, it's mind-boggling that Alabama & Tennessee had so many tornadoes but Mississippi only has 1 documented from that day. My guess is that day had about the same number of tornadoes as 4/27/11 did.
I had a tornado a few miles from my house the morning after 4/27/11, which always makes me chuckle a little considering I live in northeastern PA. Those outbreaks were so big that it's honestly hard to convey or wrap your head around the scale. Also, I'm surprised more hasn't been done over the years to dig into some of the lesser-known 4/3/74 tornadoes. We've covered some of them here but there are still a ton of others for which there's little to no info/photos.
The fact that there were probably at least half a dozen tornadoes more violent on 4/27/11 will never not be insane. Tuscaloosa would've been the clear main event on most other tornado days in modern history.
When you really dig deeper into April 27th and look into some of the lesser known EF3-4 tornadoes it’s pretty clear the true number of violent tornadoes was quite a bit higher than what is shown. There were probably at least 22-24 total violent tornadoes, many of which just didn’t hit anything at their peak or were just blatantly underrated such as Barnseville GA and New Wren MS, just to name a select few. There were definitely a handful more tornadoes that were capable of EF5 damage, hell even Cullman likely hit EF5 strength several times along its path. The outbreak was just insane on so many levels and Tornadotalk is doing a great job at uncovering the true violence of it all.
Broadview - aka the former Eighth F5 of 1974 - would be a good start. Formed from the same cell as the first Tanner tornado. Got downgraded after a quartlet of people who wrote a Lawrence 1998 study sent a letter to the NWS requesting it, a 1952 tornado and part of the Tanner 2 damage path all be downgraded.
4/27/11 and 4/3/74 probably both had at least a dozen F/EF5s in a single day, but not all hit DIs capable of registering it or were just underrated for a variety of reasons.
www.tornadotalk.com
You're right up until you bunch 4/3/74 with "at least a dozen F5s". Broadview was actually downgraded because the F5 damage was flat out unverifiable, and of the 7 remaining -
Well, I don't think any tornado would pass muster for EF5 anymore with the direction the scale's headed lol.
At some point there needs to be huge books written about them.
It took me like 60,000 words to cover the (comparatively) small 5/31/85 outbreak; I can only imagine an in-depth book on 4/3/74 would be in War and Peace territory lol
I've been subbed to this channel for awhile now, very good content indeed.
Yes but it's important work, and in capable hands. Maybe take it on in chunks then stitch them together at the end.
Thanks! That's the goal. I'm sure I obsess way too much over details that most people don't care about, but for me personally, being able to sort of build a mental image of what it was actually like to be there and how different places and people related to one another and whatnot is a big part of what makes studying these events so interesting. It's one thing to see some really impressive damage photos or hear stories of individual victims & survivors - it's another to understand how they all fit together. Hopefully I can figure out how to convey that.
