149- Mile Path!
April 26th, 2010 at 3:27 am by Bill Steffen under Bill's Blog, News, Weather
<–The Burning Windsor band traveled north on I-55 in Holmes County, Mississippi early Saturday afternoon. The band was trying to get to Memphis for a gig Saturday night. They never realized they were driving straight into the path of an EF4 tornado! Check out this video (and make sure you click the button on the lower right to make it full scream, er, I mean full screen). The preliminary damage survey by the National Weather Service from the tornadoes in Mississippi on Saturday is nothing short of incredible. There is a continuous tornado damage path of 149 miles from west of Tullulah, Louisiana to near Columbus, Mississippi. That’s where they had to stop surveying for the day. There was one spot where the tornado was an astonishing 1.75 miles wide! The survey team found two spots where damage was rated EF4 with winds estimated to be 170 mph (in Yazoo City and in Holmes Co.). There were many places along the path with EF3 damage with winds of at least 150 mph. During the 97-mile path, this tornado killed 10 people and 50+ more were injured. There were two tornado fatalities in Alabama. The University Medical Center in Jackson still has 28 victims, some still in critical condition. Ten of the injured were released from the hospital on Sunday. A trash container was found three miles away, blown through the air from a bar in Yazoo City. Power is still out in portions of the area and will likely not be fully restored until Weds. or Thurs. The strongest tornado in Mississippi last year was EF2. A total of 55 tornadoes were reported Saturday in seven states. The outlooks, watches (PDS) and warnings for this storm were outstanding. Without these alerts, the death toll might have, no would have been much greater. The National Weather Service is to be commended for their excellent work!
Fantastic video! Thank you!!!
And you thought UNITED was rough on guitars?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo
I am sure with-in a few short weeks, we will start seeing bad weather here in west Michigan. Sad to say, most people thinks it’s a joke when the NWS issues watches and warnings. I hear people say, we haven’t had any real bad storms lately, nothing is going to happen.
I was watching CNN yesterday morning and they were doing updates about that tornado. Absolutely amazing that more people weren’t killed. The destruction is stunning. These band members are very lucky to live through something like that. Again, it proves the awesome force of mother nature. There is no match.
I want a F4 Tornado to come down my street so I can get some video only for Bill and news 8 nobody else ….Thats my goal this summer Stay tuned……. a good side of INDY on the northside!!!!!!!!
Thank God these guys made it thru the Tornado. The insterments are replaceable. Our time is comming soon I;m afraid
The band’s video was amazing/scary!!!
If *I* was the Mom of one of those guys – I would have mentioned that when the skies are threatening – LISTEN TO LOCAL RADIO STATIONS!!! I’d like to think that had they heard there was a tornado warning – they would have stopped driving when the winds picked up????
And to the credit of the NWS – folks in the tornado’s path said they had ample warning.
I just went to Reed “Storm Chasers” Timmer’s website – and of course, he was witness to the monster. But for someone who normally drives INTO tornadoes – he took a WIDE berth around THIS one……. smart boy!
MAN WHAT A VIDEO !!! It would take more than bleach to clean my drawers.
Didn’t we have that massive F5 in 56 tat killed 17 people?
My best friend’s mom and uncle were in the tornado’s path. The uncle was able to take shelter in an interior closet and, even though basically only two walls of his home were left standing, he was mostly unscathed. My friend’s mom, however, was not as fortunate. Her home is literally completely gone–all that is left to indicate a home was there is the foundation. Although she is probably lucky to be alive right now, she is in very serious condition with multiple lacerations and broken bones (including compound fractures).
Wow Dan Sorry to hear that. I don’t wish that on anyone around here, just want a good lightening show and thunder. Which is what we usually get.
I just got off the phone with my friend (first time I’ve been able to talk with him since Sunday since they have very little cell-phone coverage in the part of rural MS where his mom lives). His mom was able to come out of ICU this morning, but she still needs to have surgery sometime in the next few days. They have no idea when she will be released from the hospital.
Southwest Michigan now belongs to it’s own ‘Alley’ according to a University of Akron graduate assistant.
We are in ‘Hoosier Alley’
http://news.discovery.com/earth/redefining-tornado-alleys.html
The Yazoo Tornado fits sqaurely within the statistical ‘dixie alley’ shown on the map.
we haven’t seen a lot of *bad* tornadoes here in recent memory. Most of those EF3′s and all of the EF4′s and EF5′s occurred several decades ago. So really we are in this ‘alley’ based on data from 1950-1980, since there isn’t a whole lot after that. Just a small handful of EF3′s since then, no 4s. no 5s. Got to wonder which is the anomaly, the lack of destructive tornadoes now, or unusual frequency of them during the middle half of the last century?
Back to the map. I think it’s unusual to exclude EF2′s and EF1′s. Seems as though the map would be quite different. Also, what about un-measured tornadoes that hit farmland or open prairie? I would think those two factors still make the traditional tornado alley ‘king’ of the alleys, if not just larger in scale.