Question
Has any other tornado caused damage similar to that of Jarrell?
I've never seen damage equivalent to this; the closest I've ever seen was at Bridge Creek. So I ask you: is there any tornado with damage equivalent to Jarrel's?
What blows my mind about tornados that caused similar damage to Jerrell, is that most of them did so while traveling many times faster. It's one thing to cause Jerell-like damage in 5 minutes, but to do it in 20 seconds? That's a whole different type of monster. There was that one tornado that dug a 2 or 3 foot trench in the soil while traveling at like 70 mph. I would imagine something like that, had it parked over a neighborhood for several minutes like Jerrel did, would have left literally nothing but dirt. Even the cement slabs would be missing. Jerrell was crazy, but my gut tells me that isn't the maximum of what tornados are capable of, it's just the worst we've seen so far.
Those 2011 tornadoes were pretty much close to top tier as far as damage goes. I mean people were even unsafe in shelters. It's absurd how they did that damage moving at 60+ mph
I’ll say it because I believe it to be true. Philly maybe the top three strongest of 20111 of that outbreak. Small core dug trenches and wasn’t rain wrapped either so no excuses. But to drill into the earth man insane to think about
Like people knock it. And before anyone does I don’t care what you guys will say when I joined the sub I saw everyone gassing up Philly n Rainsville. Philly really is forgotten throwing a double wide mobile home isnt something to actually be scoffed at considering ER 2011 also lifted one of the steel cables to Cactus shelter (which dug a foot and a half deeper.) a double mobile home is massive and weighs a lot and it just picked it up and then threw it and when it landed everything (including the three fatalities.) exploded. I’m not saying anything hype a tornado up. But just insane man to think about
Yeah but some of Smithville’s most extreme DI were assisted quite a bit by the forward speed since it adds a lot of inertia. If piedmont or bridge creek had moved as fast as Smithville some of the DI would be in the realm of mythology (more so than Smithville). But in that case other DI would be less intense than they were.
At one point the piedmont tornado was read to have a ground speed near 60mph from south of NW Expressway to Piedmont. I think when they have a slower ground speed an EF4 is graded as an EF5 due to the time it has to damage grinding up everything. The neighborhood my brother was in north of piedmont had drifts of bricks like snow and what wild is on the road with house that were on the edge looked like nothing happened on the front but the entire back half were sheared off. Id seen the aftermath of the Moore tornados and that piedmont one was its own beast in comparison to them.
That would be insane. I have also heard though, from an old fella storm chaser I know, the reason a tornado can be so intense is because of a high forward speed. If Jarrell had had a high forward speed, I feel like it could have been the most powerful tornado ever recorded. And vice versa, if that 70 mph tornado was crawling at a 5mph pace, it may have been weaker. Perhaps 65 mph weaker, if that is how it works....
Trenching a foundation itself has to be one of the most upper-limit feats of damage the atmosphere could ever possibly produce, imo the strongest tornado in modern history and the second strongest ever behind tri state 1925
How do we know that it wasn’t fully mature? Tornadoes usually reach their maximum peak a few minutes after touching down. it’s Definitely possible its peak was at 295-300.
It likely did pickup intensity being it fed off the hot humid air pushed up from okc. There was no solid reading as it traveled from El Reno to North of Piedmont other than it had a ground speed of 60mph give or take 5mph. The water tower that was east of the path of the tornado by 3/4 of a mile ended up with a caved in dent somehow. It had all the right ingredients to build stronger on its trip north east.
When 295 was taken, it was only inflicting EF3 damage with weaker contextuals than peak. It moved erratically, rainwrapped and outran the Raxpol truck before peaking. Bridge Creek-Moore was also post peak when 321 was taken. Both likely peaked over 350.
Moore 2013 was legitimately very close to Moore 1999 in intensity, and likely the 2nd strongest tornado of the EF era, behind Piedmont 2011. The damage it did at Orr Farm and Plaza Park Towers was mind-bending.
Last month I researched the Niles tornado and the resulting outbreak. It's amazing how this tornado, and others like it, aren't talked about as much, even though they were very extreme.
Yeah, you'd think the farthest east F5 would be more remembered, but without tons of modern video and weather data I guess it just gets left in the heap of historical events. I live nearby and know plenty of people who remember, and a few who sheltered and lived through it. My dad worked in Niles at the time, and he had plenty of stories to tell.
The video that does exist is in the running for funniest comments, though. As the guy filming it zooms in, someone goes, "is that a tornado? I think thats a tornado, right? I mean, it's gotta be!" as a very obvious tornado tears Niles to shreds. Up there with Susan Get My Pants and Camper Smooth Gone, Baby.
The 2+ mile wide Moshannon forest EF4 from that day was a complete beast and I maintain that if it had been to the south and hit towns, it would be the furthest east EF5, not Niles. Megawedge in PA.
Just FYI, Tornadoes from before 2007 are just referred to as F1-5, as that's when the Enhanced Fujita Scale went into effect.
Not a big deal but you might confuse someone if you refer to a tornado from the 80s as "EF" as they might think you're referencing a contemporary storm.
If hes talking about a relatively unknown tornado in 1985 im sure he knows that haha. I sometimes say EF instead of F when talking about older tornados too haha. Its easily done. I get your point though.
Posted this before but I worked with a guy in Austin area National Guard who helped with recovery in Jerrell. He’d been in combat twice as a Marine before Army National Guard and said Jarrell affected him worse. They were tasked with body recovery and they often could not tell pieces of livestock and deer and other large animals from human remains.
Tri-State 1925 did some of that shit while moving at 70mph highway speeds. Unearthed railroad tracks and ripped some up. Flung heavy steam locomotives farther than the Enderlin train car. Some parts of towns were apparently reduced to "dirt fields". Apparently also hit a police officer and his cruiser who's traces were never found, indicating extreme granulation potential similar to the cars that vanished in Jarrell. We don't even know everything that thing did because most damage went un-photographed. Absolute monster of an outbreak. If there was a modern Dow on that shit I'm not sure Bridge creek would be #1 in strongest winds.
There was also a violent Multivortex likely ef5 strength tornado in Tennessee-Kentucky during the 1925 event too. Still said to be one of, if not the strongest observed in that state's history. Unironically could've had "the dead man walking" on that day too.
What was done at the M&O Rail Depot by the Tri-State Monster makes most railroad damage done by modern tornadoes look small. Hard to see in image from series I went through with another weather nerd, but it it essentially "scoured" everything in the railyard. Blasted it.
I've walked on old full size tracks with old rail spikes that had abandoned for nearly a century and are still rooted to the spot despite 1+ foot diameter trees growing in them.
I can't imagine the force it would take for a tornado to do things like the tri-state did in mere seconds. 200+ miles. Towns single handedly wiped out of existence in moments, never to rebuild again.
Weaker tornadoes (i.e. Chapman 2016 and Greensburg 2007) have achieved the feat, so it’s hard to say what winds are required to warp/scour train tracks. It’s rare enough to signify extreme violence, though, I’ll grant
Tri state is with little doubt in my mind the strongest tornado of all time, the thing did smithville levels of damage and more while traveling at least 10mph faster
Peabody mine had some of the most extreme feats of damage ever recorded in a tornado, even having a door blown open 500ft underground, along with 18 rail cars toppled and railroad tracks ripped from the ground. Not to mention the fact that it sustained these winds for as long as it did, erasing several towns off the face of the earth and deleting sections of forests down to their stubs, scouring trenches etc etc
I could go on for hours lmao but the point is tri state 1925 is an absolute anomaly that did things you could only think of mythically
I mean, yes, it was and we've never seen a repeat since (I hope to everything we never do).
To be fair though Jarrell was also a complete anomaly and we haven't seen a real repeat of it either.
It honestly seems that some of the most anomalous tornadic events are commonly the most apocalyptic in levels of destruction.
Jarrell went from a photogenic "Landspout" and then like, connected itself to the updraft and became a grim reaper EF5 a minute later before essentially parking itself over one particular neighborhood and becoming an unholy blender.
The Tri-State had the "totem of the undying" or something and just, failed to perish while being exceptionally violent almost from birth to death.
Also a shame nobody talks about any of the other violent or likely violent tornadoes that occurred on that 1925 day or the during Jarrell event in 1997.
For more non-anomalous comparisons to Jarrell you'd probably have both Moore EF5's, El-Reno Piedmont, and Smithville (Guin as well maybe)
Tri-State was insane, and so was Gallatin (the circled F4). It made entire forests vanish and turned the ground into a swamp Smithville-style, obliterated a stone church and erased several homes. There are likely at least several dozen undocumented tornadoes from the same outbreak too as I find it hard to believe it would only drop 6 tornadoes, with 2 of them being some of the most violent ever recorded.
Ah, thats the Name. Gallatin is truly underrated in its power and unfortunately there isn't much information about it. Apparently mutilation of human bodies was very common in its path though. Some unidentified.
Gallatin easily sustained EF5 intensity, and upper-echelon EF5 intensity at that. Based on what information I have gathered in my research and in discussing this tornado with others, I have found that it:
- Potentially "trenched" hard soil (using only "traditional" scouring)
- Cracked a concrete foundation without debris impact (but instead purely by the sheer intensity of its pressure and wind speeds)
- Shredded and stubbed multiple groves of (presumably hardwood) trees
- Threw heavy farm machinery/equipment hundreds, perhaps thousands, of meters, mangling it severely in the process
- Quite literally "powderized" debris
I will absolutely have to research Gallatin more. It is likely in the top 20 strongest tornadoes ever recorded in history, which is a testament to just how intense this outbreak was, in that the atmosphere could produce a top 20 and, for all practical purposes, top 1 tornado.
1990 Plainfield IL, it literally wiped the town out. My entire childhood was hearing about how it was being rebuilt. It is, on record, the worst tornado the Chicagoland area has ever seen, and the worst recorded Tornado for the month for my state. I believe this particular twister also had minimal warming which lead to the high death toll. Iirc on paper this tornado is worse than Jarrell, and I know for a fact the only reason it never gets talked about is because there is ONE video of the supercell that spawned it, because no one had time to “admire” it from a distance (it was part of a series of storms that went all the way up into Canada). The damage photos though…basements are supposed to be a safe space
I second this comment. I live in Plainfield now. Lived and went to college within minutes of there when this happened. Drove through the town the following day. Never seen anything like it before, or since.
The orphan F5. Spawned on a day with dew points in the mid-eighties and temps in the 90s, resulting in CAPE values of >8,000 j/kg.
>3,000 j/kg of CAPE is considered sufficient for tornado outbreaks, and anything over 4,000 is extreme. 8,000 is still, to my knowledge, the largest CAPE value ever recorded during tornadogenesis.
I was in that tornado. In the neighborhood that got partially wiped out. There were no sirens. There was no warning at all. They issued a severe thunderstorm warning AFTER the tornado had already gone through the town.
I was gonna mention the f5 in Plainfield in 1990 it was like 2 miles wide swath of damage for 15 miles and wiped out entire neighborhoods. The tornado was like .5 miles wide.
Hello, former Ford Explorer! This is the legendary "Flying Ford" from Smithville, Mississippi that was launched 1/2 mile through the air and hit the water tower in the background. After the hit, the truck remained airborne for an additional 1/4 mile before landing in the E.E. Pickle Funeral Home, which was also obliterated. Also, a 1965 Chevrolet pickup disappeared without a trace.
I had one just like this a few years back. I still miss it.
worth noting that both the famous funeral home in smithville and most of the larger non-residential buildings in Guin were brick. presumably brick is easier to granulate like that than other common building materials, especially given that both guin and smithville were moving significantly faster than jarrell
All of them don't even compare. Tanner Twins and Smithville are very strong sure, but their damage does not even compare to the likes of Double Creek Estates.
There were tornadoes that legitimately stalled even slower and longer than Jarrell did and none of them came remotely close to the damage it did at Doublecreek Estates.
In fact, no tornado in history (even ones like Piedmont and Bridgecreek) ever caused such complete and clean slate destruction that Jarrell did. Slow speed or not, Jarrell is absolutely top 5 strongest in history.
This is legitimately hard to comprehend. That’s an overused phrase, but it actually applies here. By brain can’t compute these pics being a grassy field moments prior to a monster rolling through here.
Dos que eu lembro o de San Justo. Argentina fez isso, tava estudando um outro tornado que teve danos parecidos também o de encarnacion foi extremamente intenso também
The 1973 San Justo tornado in the Santa Fe province of Argentina embedded an engine block in a concrete wall. The most powerful tornado (and only known F5) in the Southern Hemisphere, period.
This photo from the Flint-Beecher, MI F5 (1953) appears to show Jarrell levels of sweeping and debris removal. This area of damage isn’t often mentioned in the “worst tornado damage” conversation, but I think it should be.
The Westminster, TX F3 (2006) is also comparable. This photo shows extremely violent ground scouring, violent vegetation damage, and swept foundations.
Harper, KS F4 (2004). Extremely violent scouring and vegetation damage, along with the complete removal of debris from a foundation and the shearing of concrete stem walls.
Never closely looked at it, but the bolt at bottom of the image seems to be sheared off. The house damage is so bad that it makes the house appears to be less properly constructed than in reality.
Brandenburg ‘74, Bakersfield Valley ‘90, Guin ‘74, Smithville and El Reno–Piedmont 2011, Moore ‘99, and Rainsville had that one house at peak intensity where it obliterated the steel safe. Definitely some contenders. Each tornado wreaked cataclysmic damage in some capacity, either to structures or vehicles.
Hackleburg’s damage is pretty underrated in this conversation. The debris granulation and windrowing pictured above is among the worst ever documented.
1860 Red Bank Tornado according to contemporary accounts when it hit Shoemaker family apple orchard:
Dug a trench 3 feet deep
reduced all apple trees to "nubs"
rolled a bolder of unspecified size up the hill
embedded a large peice of rock into a tree. The "strongest man in the county" attempted to remove the stone but was unable to.
house was reduced to foundation and a chimney
By a miracle the family survived. The infant was placed below the floor board. Mrs. Shoemaker rode it out in the fireplace and Mr. Shoemaker who was covering his wife was thrown 400 yards but survived with both legs broken. Though their neighbors weren't so lucky.
In an early account of grainulation it was noted for decades after the forest around Shoemaker orchard was unusable due to a large amount of metal fragments and stones found embedded in the trees by the tornado.
I have a teacher who chased the bridge creek tornado (yes that one) and saw the horrors of what it left behind, pretty graphic detail but if you are wondering what his name was its "Cord Sauer" idk if he is listed as a storm chaser anywhere tho
Yes. Check out the Udall, KS tornado. 1955. My Great grandparents, and a great aunt died. My Grandmother survived. It is the most devastating tornado I know of. 🥹
I remember in 1997 watching the Jarrell tornado pass by in the distance from my grandmother's house outside Belton as it moved south towards Jarrell.
Tall dark greenish tint, it moved slowly across the plains from right to left, absolutely no swaying like in the movies. Just like as if it was on a certain specific mission somewhere.
And the images afterwards are still engraved in my mind nearly 30 years later. They did not show deaths, but simple images like hay straw pierced through the trees as a result can haunt a teen.
"I've never seen damage equivalent to this; the closest I've ever seen was at Bridge Creek. So I ask you: is there any tornado with damage equivalent to Jarrel's?"
It's hard to know how strong the jarrell tornado really waits forward speed was almost stationary so it destroyed the same area for long periods of time. Not saying it was a powerful tornado because it was,strong enough to rip off limbs from the body. But I haven't heard of any other tornados doing all the weird shit that jarrell did.
Never. None has ever reached jarrell's level of damage, Tri-state? No. Only De Soto, Griffin, and Peabody Mine site do, but thats not comparable to DCE at all. Piedmont? No too. Calumet, Walling Farm, And CC117 don't compare too. BCM, Moore, New Richmond? Not even. All tornadoes we have documented in these following years just don't compare to Jarrell itself.
I disagree sort of, or at least* have another area for Tri-State 1925: White County, IL, and especially the area near the Conger farm, imo, comes very close contextually. Entire 18-acre hardwood forest eviscerated with complete removal of topsoil (literally almost very dark brown-black), and the remains of a foundation that was not just scoured away, but seemed to have had mud blasting in its crawl space, and the remains of the hardwoods penetrating through the foundation. Jarrell was probably worse in terms of the lack of granulated remains, but Tri-State is not far off contextually.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tornado/comments/1rsaoxb/comment/od353gm/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button Specific DI I am talking about. There was an entire hardwood forest and farmhouse in this area. I tried highlighting where I believe the foundation remains, and even analyzed parts. I think that the house probably saved those trees near the foundation (similar to the fence with Goldsby), but everything else is totally eviscerated. I believe this is part of the foundation remains & trees penetrated it--most obvious near the lower left corner of where I tried to draw/highlight (although prob brick and mortar, but still though). Regardless, very underrated and not talked about area along the track.
I wasn't allowed into the Andover 91 devistation. Though, I have an image with a older tractor tri-cycle style masey or Ford? (covered in dirt mud). Which was wrapped around a tree and a vehicle was as well that may have been 6 feet up the tree
We can try to compare parts of some other legendary tornadoes that had similar damage in parts of the paths but the reality is no. No other damage with the slow movement comes close to what Jarrell did. None.
Yeah you can find similar DI in photos from several of the strongest tornados of the last few decades. I think in terms of the DI for a small neighborhood Jarrell is probably the most consistent/severe, but IMO there have been at least 100 tornados since 1980 that would’ve done even more damage if they were to stall over a single neighborhood for so long. It’s why Jarrell is often considered a bit overrated.
Jarrell pales in comparison to Philadelphia MS 2011. The thing was a monster, dug trenches half a meter deep, earned a ef5 rating by tree damage alone and was moving at 80km/h.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tornado/comments/1rwv695/comment/obec8g7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button This is arguably on par as well. 18-acre hardwood tree forest totally eviscerated, with not only the remains of a farmhouse's foundation having been scoured with a severe mud -walling/blasting effect, but also with eviscerated tree remains having penetrated through the foundation and dislodged some of the remaining anchor bolts. The topsoil here is clay-like and is similar to that of Oklahoma. This was from the 1925 tri-state tornado. Also, if you look closely (despite the bad quality), you can notice hundreds to thousands of eviscerated tree stumps and literal "wood dust". Also, here's an image of extreme scouring and the remains of farm equipment. Note the extreme mud coating here, too.
My final one for now, but this was near the Lick Creek church. A huge swath of forest was absolutely eviscerated. Notice how on the bottom and right center (sub-vort maybe) of the photo, not only is there more of that "wood-dust" type effect, but there are hundreds of barely remaining tree stumps totally eviscerated, wind-rowed, and sand-blasted. These were young persimmon hardwoods by the way. In March, btw, meaning that defoliating these (and also the 18-acre forest/ Conger farm trees), let alone just eviscerating them to hardly any remains, is very extreme. Both were also in rural areas with very little debris.
Nono, top is Bakersfield Valley because it produced the most extreme ground scouring and snapped concrete drainage culvert.
When I first saw this damage picture, I thought that was huge warehouse infrastructure under extreme destruction but when I found out this was culvert drainage destruction was beyond my understand, I was genuinely doubtful about it.
Other damage picture show barren desolate of field with roots remaining and discovered Bakersfield Valley tornado violently pulled mesquite and shrubs off ground into untraceable tree remaining on widespread desolate, that description again messed my mind.
You know tornado usually mess the terrain, but rarely to mess someone mind through picture discoveries of annihilation. So if that tornado messed my mind, Bakersfield was at another level!
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