First and foremost, prayers go out to those who were injured and the families of those that lost loved ones in the tornadoes. It does appear that ‘most’ of the areas did get at least some warning, but once again remote areas seem to be lagging on availability of notifications.
Latest death toll is now apparently over 90, with many still missing. Sadly, this total will probably increase.
Post mortem reporting on the tornadoes that hit from Arkansas to Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
Initial surveys have confirmed at least 38 tornadoes, with many more surveys still ongoing over the coming days.
The seven strongest tornadoes have each been given an EF-3 rating on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, including the twisters that struck Mayfield, Kentucky; Bowling Green, Kentucky; Saloma, Kentucky; Edwardsville, Illinois; Defiance, Missouri; a long-track tornado that was on the ground for more than 71 miles from Newbern to Paris Landing, Tennessee; and another long-track tornado that tracked from Weiner, Arkansas, to Hornersville, Missouri.
Full article, HERE from Fox News.
BUT, contrary to what the MSM/Climate types are saying, these aren’t the worst to hit…
A catastrophic EF-5 tornado has not been documented in the United States in more than eight years, the longest span between “5-rated” twisters in historical records dating to 1950.
Full article, HERE.
Yes, I live on the dry line, and I do have a weather alert radio. I have a Midland WR300 and have had in for five years. It’s a mid-priced unit, about $60. The picture below will take you to the Amazon page for it.
Folks, weather is just that… weather. NWS does the best they can with the tools they have (which have improved considerably) to predict extreme weather, but it is still more art than science. And yes, weather IS changeable. It has been changing since long before we were here, and our ‘accurate’ records are a microcosm of the actual cycles of the weather this world is experiencing.
The link to NOAA/NWS to get your weather is HERE.
Sadly, the ‘true’ experts, the climatologists, anthropologists, and geologists who have studied long term geological and flora and fauna have been/are being silenced in the whole mess.
I have the Midland Wr400 which does all the same with the added features of being a clock/radio. It sits on my nightstand and wakes me up reliably every day. Super accurate clock and the battery backup runs a long time.
At 03:50 on this past Sept. 9th, it went off for a tornado warning… here in rural eastern Kommiecticut! I got up, hit the bathroom, and grabbed my phone to check the local radar. On the lock screen was the emergency alert. Then I saw the radar. HOLY CRAP! I immediaty woke my wife and the dogs and we headed for the basement. It got wild and loud as the line went by. No damage for us, but as the line passed to the east it spun up EF0 & EF1 tornadoes at the border towns and into Rhode Island. Thankfully minor damage and no injuries.
I have the same radio, Navy.
At that cost it is cheap insurance for those of us in tornado alley.
That Midland WR300 is the optimal weather radio. Got one here at the house and got one for my folks.
I have been following the weather since we just missed the 1970 disaster in Lubbock. It let down over the house, but hit farther to the north east. I have one of those Midland radios, don’t know the model. I’m in a hole, so usually, the tone will break squelch and I’ll hear loud static. That’s the cue to dig into the WX and figure out what’s up.
I found a young man on YT that did a bang up job predicting this and following it. Look up Ryan Hall Ya’ll on YT. He’s better than the weather channel in my mind. I watched for a couple hours while this was unfolding and he was GOOD.
My parents and I were in Odessa, TX visiting family when Lubbock was hit in 1970. We had to go through Lubbock to get back home to Amarillo. We were rerouted past a lot of the damaged area returning home, but I still saw a lot of serious damage. Glad it missed you. At my last job, I worked with a couple of former Midland employees who helped develop the weather radios with the SAME (Specific Are Message Encoder) technology. Several interesting stories about that process.
Off topic rant removed.
Edgetho,
If that level of on topic is your normal commenting custom, it does not surprise me that you get moderated regularly.
You haven’t made any connection to the somewhat interesting topic of tornadoes.
You also make reference to a bunch of occurrences that to this blog reader have an unclear context.
Your meaning and position are not clear enough for me to know where my opinion is in relation.
You have expressed a bunch of things, and I am not sure how to break them down, in order to have anything to comment on.
It seems like more deaths than I usually expect from a storm that produces multiple tornadoes. However, it should be obvious that I haven’t looked at the data or really comprehended the scale of this event, in comparison to other events.
I enthusiastically concur with a lack of information about true long term trends.
North America apparently has more tornadoes than some of the other continents. North America has only recently had the record keeping and in-habitation to have a apples to apples comparison to current ability to track weather a little by death rate.
And modern weather radar are modern, so the events that we monitor by radar and not death rates likewise do not have any long term comparison.
Tornadoes at night are always worse. People are asleep and caught unawares.
And big industrial warehouses are not tornado-weather friendly.
And places within tornado alley that don’t have tornado shelters, especially businesses, weird. Very weird.
That’s a good point.
Some places, the water-table prevents having a basement-type shelter, and retrofitting a “storm-closet” is very expensive. I don’t know about the warehouses, but trying to design a concrete “safe room” or rooms that could hold all the employees, and making certain that everyone got into them . . . I’ve never heard of one being available, thus far.
My husband’s former workplace, a manufacturing plant, had a core of bathrooms that would fit everyone on the shift into the men’s and women’s rooms. Many a night (he worked overnights) were spent on a concrete floor in a reinforced concrete/rebar/cinderblock bathroom, trying to pull up radar to see what the hell had set off the alarms… only to discover it was for a squall line half a county away and moving NE away from the plant. Still … better safe than sorry. The weekend OT due to too many “storm breaks” sucked but– Just wish the folks at Amazon and a certain candle factory had had as much protection as my husband did.
Latest version of the weather satellites, GEOS-16 and 17 IIRC, have a much improved resolution and there are indications that the data MAY (enough qualifiers yet) be detailed enough to detect tornado formation. I’m sure it is years away from deployment, but they brains think they may be able to give 15 minutes warning! It has the potential of saving a lot of lives.
I’m just shocked at the long-tracking twisters. Dad’s volunteering with a non-profit to go help with clean up.
Every time there is any sort of weather-related event, the woke (with their agenda in mind) blame global warming. We had a blizzard here at the White Wolf Mine last night. It was a real white-out. If there were progressives here, they’d be blaming global warming. Thankfully I’m spared living around people like that.
We had at least 36 hours warning for the potential tornado activity here in Bowling Green. By Friday afternoon it a tornado watch starting by 17:00 hours till 06:00 Saturday. The sirens went off twice Friday night and the weather radio and TV stations sent out alerts before being knocked off the air. There were between one and three tornados on the ground that hit the middle of town out to the BG Corvette plant and museum. Still no power in large sections of town because there are no power poles that are not snapped or knocked down. It’s still a real mess but they are making progress.
BTW we never heard the tornado sirens where I live. The damage is about 3-6 miles west of us. Tornados are fairly frequent in this part of the country but not like Tornado Alley
We have an old Radio Shack weather radio (originally bought for my in-laws, but FIL wanted a coffee maker instead. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer). The NOAA station for us is about 80 miles away, on the other side of the Cascades, but NOAA does a good job for alerts. They’re so-so on the forecasts, but our area is tough–lots of hills and valleys with microclimates to suit.
I also have a RS portable that I’ve used while traveling. North Platte, Nebraska had an interesting storm one night–Lightning Activity level 6 (top of the list), then a tornado warning. Had to drive in the lightning, but the twister faded before it hit town, so I didn’t need the hotel’s shelter, if any…
We bought one of those wind-up AM-FM radio/flashlight/
electric shaverweather radio, and it does a phenomenal job at being lousy at all functions.I have a handheld radio I had bought for a stint at a volunteer fire brigade. After I left, I reprogrammed it to get the NOAA channels. No alert function, but it’s more sensitive than the RS scanner. My ham radio handheld also has weather channel pickup. Haven’t used it much for that, but I don’t think it has an alert.
All- Thanks for the comments, and TXRed is correct, it is just about impossible to put a ‘big enough’ shelter in a warehouse. Too much lost/unusable space 99% of the time. Smaller, multiple shelters bolted down ‘might’ work better.
RC- Those wind up ones were recalled a few years ago as being a fire hazard!!!
This wind-up one is a lot smaller than earlier ones*, and I think we got it a year or two ago. Amazon has a slightly newer version, sold by “Running Snail”. It might be OK where the transmitters are close by, but where we live, the AM transmitters don’t have much power, nor are they close by. FM is worse.
(*) We had one, but the crankup mechanism went toes up years ago.
Currently looking at 8 tornado warnings and 14 T-storm warnings way west of us and headed our direction. Forecast says 70mph gusts in a few hours, stay close to shelter, etc. NWS says this type of storm system has never been seen before in WI in December. And people wonder why I drink…
I’d looked at the radar a little bit ago, and thought it looked interesting in that direction.
Interior closets are a good idea, if nothing else better is available.
Won’t help if the whole building is blown away. Does help if you just have a branch or something go through a window.
I’ve also spent time huddled in an interior hall with a mattress over my head.
These days, there’s a chance my sinuses would hurt so bad that I would find it difficult to care about possibly dying.
” sinuses would hurt so bad that I would find it difficult to care about possibly dying”
Peace thru maladaptive biology!
The gust front (not quite the right term) has arrived; I just heard some furniture move on the deck downwind of the house. At least my non-situational-aware roomie moved his beer cooler at my suggestion. One less missle to deal with…
Ihad a Midland, thought I’d slept thru a thunderstorm warning one night, hearing is bad. When the Friday weather was predicted, I tested my radio and discovered that the speaker was dead…off to Radio Shack to buy a new one. Go thru the menu and hit the “test” option to make sure yours is still working properly.
Tornados are bad news. I’ve seen a few in Illinois, and their aftermath. The bad ones make the landscape look it was bombed in WWII.
All of my scanners have a WX radio function, and it goes off once in a while here. Tornados are rare here, but we have severe thunderstorms and hail to make up for it.
Careful out there, the wind’s blowing strong here.
Building in-ground “bunkers” for warehouses, might be prohibitive. However, reinforcing the walls of areas that are unlikely to be relocated (rest rooms, machinery rooms, pump rooms, computer rooms, etc) while adding enough structural elements to interior “structures” to support “dropped” roof and exterior wall segments elsewhere might be useful and relatively inexpensive. Also using reinforced lower segments in outer walls would serve as “wind breaks” and be compatible with common “tip-up” or “tent panel” walls above. Securing warehouse storage frames to each other, to structure, etc would provide additional protection and reduce wind-borne debris. Securely interconnecting structural components would limit crush and impact injuries. Remember: “uplift”. Who cares if roof membrane or insulation gets blown away? Check with the military. They are used to planning for “flying fragments”.There are a lot of options between “Fort Knox” and a poncho hung from a tree. Texas Tech has a lab that studies impact resistant wall components.
A lot could be gained by thinking past the “shake-an-bake” mentality.
I live in Mayfield. Lost a window but the 100′ magnolia snapped in half and the plum tree was uprooted. Fencing down but compared to what happened 2 blocks away I am blessed. Samaritan Purse showed up on Monday and on Wed they had my yard and 2 neighbors yard spic and span. Amazing group of volunteers. So impressed with al the volunteers that have poured into town. I got power and internet today so yeah my house is warming up and maybe by tomorrow I can have a hot shower. So thanks for all the prayers and volunteers. We could not have gotten through this without you.