This past weekend The Oracle and I traveled to Missouri to spend the weekend with my brother and his family.
Joplin, MO to be exact.
Home of the soon-to-be recategorized F6 tornado of May 22, 2011.
It was a great visit; we haven’t seen them in 18 months and it was great to get caught up and to see where they live. They moved there about 3 years ago and it was our first time getting there.
Among the many things we crammed into 2 full days was what the locals call “The Tornado Tour”. They showed us Ground Zero for the tornado – a grassy hill whose landscape has been forever changed. They showed us neighborhoods that have already been rebuilt and others, like the image at left, that still show the devastation. You would drive down one street after another and see nothing – literally. No trees, no structures, just flat concrete slabs where a house or building used to be. Then other streets would show random, minor damage and still others would have partial structures and trees still standing.
They showed us where the high school once stood. The day the tornado hit was graduation day and thankfully the ceremony had already been scheduled to be held elsewhere so there was no one at the school. The high school building wasn’t so lucky – it was mostly taken away by the tornado; what was left has been demolished and is now a 1-story tall pile of rubble. The image at right is of a tree near the site of the school – the tree is dead (as are most of the trees that weren’t uprooted or shredded into pieces) yet the citizens of Joplin refuse to let it define them. As you can see – they are painting it a kaleidoscope of colors to represent the hope that really is the definition of Joplin.
By far the most heartbreaking thing we saw – which is saying alot as it was all heartbreaking – was Mercy Hospital. Mercy is about 1/4 mile from where the monster touched down and it took a direct hit from a tornado that actually had 4 funnels within the outer wall. What you see at left is exactly how it looked after the tornado ripped thru it. Nothing has been touched yet; the tornado sucked out all the windows and actually lifted the entire hospital up, slamming it back down about 4 inches off from where it belonged.
I didn’t take any more pictures than this; it felt voyeuristic to be snapping pictures of someone else’s tragedy. 162 people died in the areas we saw – it’s sobering to say the very least.
Yet the evidence of rebuilding is everywhere; where one neighborhood is still largely flattened across the street an entirely new one has taken shape with all houses before the tornado being replaced. Even along the main shopping district, nearly 1 mile of one side is all new construction. And most notably, the Home Depot and Wal-Mart – both of which were flattened to nothing – have been rebuilt and opened for business for several months.
Joplin, MO was a lovely city; the people were all unfailingly polite. And their spirit, their resilience was an inspiration.
And one more note: the National Weather Service is likely to create a new Enhanced Fujita Scale to reflect the unique nature of the Joplin Tornado – raising it to EF6. Chief reason for this is that a wind meter atop Mercy Hospital recorded a sustained wind speed of 500 mph.
Let that sink in…
…a wind meter atop Mercy Hospital recorded a sustained wind speed of 500 mph.
Sink in? I’ve been on a mo’sickle doin’ well in excess of 100 mph and found it difficult to breathe. And hold on, for that matter. 500 mph simply doesn’t compute.
My understanding is that even fighter pilots are loath to eject at such speed, but would rather find a way to lower the speed before punching out. That’s taking into account the plane not disintegrating around you and allowing you the time to do so.
US Army Corps of Engineers map of the damage zone. Courtesy of Wiki.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Joplin-tornado-map.jpg
though I live in Texas, I am originally from Misouri. My Father and all my extended family are from there with the exception of my Mother and Brother here in Tx. We are from just north of Joplin. just up 71 highway. Butler Mo.
Kris,
Can you link the data you have concerning the 500 mph reading from the hospital and NWS’s possibility of adding a new unit to the EF scale? I am thinking you may have gotten taken in by Urban Legend talk. Try as I might, I cannot find ANY information validating those claims. and I have gone through the National Weather Services tornado damage assessment survey for the Joplin tornado. and multiple other sites. Joplin was originally classified an EF4 and then it was upgraded to an EF5 after more severe damage was found. This may be the source of the rumors about the NWS upgrading the scale based on damage found.
To the best of my discovery, NWS has no plans to create an EF6 rating.
And there is no record of a 500 mph anemometer reading anywhere. If there ever was such a reading, it was likely rejected as spurious and in error.
No offense, but it’s possible you had what I call a “Snopes moment”
CG – I heard all that from my brother and his wife, so I didn’t think to verify what they said given that they live there. Perhaps they were taken in by something…
Isn’t the vacuum created by these tremendous winds just as damaging as the wind itself? But 500 mph – isn’t that extra-planetary stuff? Like Jupiter? (just picking a planet)
I have heard of some strange things caused by narrators – like straw driving into trees –
The people of the Midwest have had their share of natural calamities the last few years – floods – tornado – and they just quietly – and without fanfare – get to work fixing things….
Closest I got to one was when I was working for Cessna in Wichita – I had just moved from San Diego and the radio announcers were warning to head for something safe – I saw the sky turning a yellowish hue and rushed outside with a camera –
I never said I was smart
Growing up in Bates County, Mo. 15 miles from the Kansas border, I lived smack in the middle of Tornado Alley.
Tornadoes were just a part of growing up.
My grade school years were in the mid to late 70′s. Between Tornado Ally and being smack in the middle of the Minuteman III dense-pack silo field…. “Duck and Cover” had a dual meaning for us.
(nearest silo to my childhood home was .8 miles)
Ever see “The Day After”? The two little kids staring in shock from their front yard as the missile takes off and the panicking mother? That’d been me and my little bro had it happened for real.
Oh, but back to your original remark about vacuum. To a degree it is damaging, most of it has to do with the direct wind forces. the differential pressure just stresses the structure, the direct pressure from the winds is what causes most of the failures.
While trying to find evidence of the NWS wanting to create an EF6 category, I came across this interesting read which describes in detail the destructive mechanics involved in tornadic winds:
“Tornado: An Engineering Oriented Perspective”
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ssd/techmemo/sr147.pdf
Wichita has the strangest weather patterns, particularly in the winter. It’s right at a point where all these fronts can converge from all directions.
One day it can be -20 and the following day +50. But the winters were almost always crystal clear. Funny thing I noticed with extreme cold (well those I suppose in areas of MN or AK would think -20 is a warm spell) – but the sky always seemed to be a darker blue and sound would carry so much farther with the dense air.
I would be at Mid Continent Airport and a little Cessna or Beechcraft doing a run up 1/4 mile away – you’d think they were 20 feet away. Tornados, blizzards, thunderstorms – they have it all!
One thing you never forget living there – the wind.
Almost always a good wind.
So a -20 winter day can seem pretty brutal.
On the vacuum – I heard somewhere that just keeping your windows open can save your house – don’t know the truth in that – although their destructive path can be a strange and peculiar thing.
I have an acquaintance in Lawton, OK. He says when the tornado warning alert goes off, people get on top of their houses to get a better look.
No problem Kris, no fault, no blame. It’s jut human nature and why so many “Old Wives Tales” and “Urban Legends” exist. During the disaster itself, there will be a lot of confusing reports. These stories get passed around and so often that people assume them to be true. Just as you never thought to question your Brother as he lives there, he too probably never thought to question what he was hearing either.
Conventional anemometers like what you would find at the hospital will be (not might be) destroyed in tornadic winds. They are not designed for and cannot handle such high velocities. It would be impossible for such a device at a local civilian hospital to register 500 mph winds.
It has only been since mobile doppler radar units, that reliable measuring of windspeeds in tornadoes have taken place. Prior to that it was done with photographic analysis of film and video images of the swirling debris in the funnel.
The highest wind speed ever measured of a tornado was 301 +/- 20 mph in the F5 Moore Oklahoma tornado in 1999. No one really knows just how fast a tornado can get. but 300+ mph is already at the rare extreme end of a phenomena that typically sees 150-200 mph. 500 mph is just way over-the-top.
CG – when you say it all like that…my face turns red in embarrassment.
Then again, when you see the level of damage on the ground there, it doesn’t seem hard to believe that 500mph winds were indeed what happened. A one mile wide tornado that stayed on the ground for 25 minutes and traveled nearly 7 miles, all the while continuing to gain strength – creates a mindset that just about anything is possible.
And when you hear the stories from the people who live there and who survived it – again, any story no matter how fantastical, could seem real.
I once found myself in the basement of a house I was guesting in, having been dragged down there at 04 gor-blimey by the lady of the house. My lucky day? Nope, it was `just a tornado` near Flushing, Flint, MI, May 1980. Watched it prowl about the vicinity on the local tv news. Weirdest things. Half a farmhouse here, an entire building there, a sharp left turn and a community is spared, unpredictable, fickle, scary, ruthless, emotionless. I feel for your family, Kris.
HD – thank you for sharing that. We actually drove home thru a super cell last year in MA – it spawned 2 extremely rare tornadoes in Western and Central MA. It was a harrowing drive to say the very least.
cb23 sailor – thanks for posting the link to that paper. Just finished reading it and learned a lot. Good stuff.
sheesh – meant to type CG23 – not cb23, sorry.
No problems MadMarine, Typos happpen. LOL
And Kris, No need for being embarrassed. I fully understand how such stories get passed about and no one thinks to question them. It stood out for me because while I am no meteorologist, I have had since childhood a natural curiosity about a great many things. From Tornadoes, to the Sinking of the Titanic, Planes crashes, Astronomy, and the physics behind everything from Nuclear detonations to cratering effects from asteroids and meteors.
I Spend hours after hours going through the WWW looking for and reading papers just like the one I posted a link to about the wind damage mechanics of tornadoes. Even if we had not been discussing tornadoes at all, if you were to mention EF-3, the first thing I would think of would be the Fujita scale. So for me, such stories “stand out” as being Over the top and too much to be true, even before trying to research it and coming up empty. For me, the research only verified what I suspected.
Bill: “‘I heard somewhere that just keeping your windows open can save your house – don’t know the truth in that ”
Yes, when I was growing up in Tornado alley I too always heard that you open the windows so that the air pressure could equalize and the house not ‘splode.
That too turns out to be an old wives tall. When a tornado seems to explode a house, it is not because of the pressure differential. It is because air gets inside the structure and blows it apart. So opening your windows just makes matters worse.