Tornado Talk Weekly (September 18, 2023)

Mid-Atlantic Severe Weather Conference!

Company Updates! 

From Owner, Jen Narramore

I hope everyone has a great week!

  • If you are looking for something to do in early November, consider heading to Richmond, VA for the 2023 Mid-Atlantic Severe Weather Conference! It will be on Saturday, November 4. The Tornado Talk team will be hosting a table there letting folks know more about who we are AND I will be one of the speakers. For those who don’t know, I am one of the panelists on the Weather Brains podcast and I have the honor of presenting along with fellow Brain Rick Smith from the National Weather Service in Norman, OK on the May 2013 Moore and El Reno OK Tornadoes.

  • Here is our latest “This Week In Tornado History” video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvoi9iL9MXw

This Week In Tornado History! 

September 18: In 2019, Tropical Storm Imelda spawned an EF1 tornado in rural Harris County, TX. Several trees were snapped or uprooted, the metal roof was removed from a house, and a barn was destroyed.

September 19: A hurricane-spawned tornado hit Apalachicola, FL on September 19, 1947. Thomas Grazulis in Significant Tornadoes gave this twister an F3 rating. There were 2 fatalities and 100 injuries. Read the Tornado Talk summary!

Image from newspapers.com

September 20: It was the second time in 26 years that the town of Xenia, OH was hit by a major tornado. Some of the same areas struck by the 1974 F5 were hit again by an F4 on September 20, 2000. Along the 9 mile path, approximately 250 homes and 40 businesses were damaged/destroyed. There was one fatality. We have a summary about this event!

September 21: On this day in 1894, an intense outbreak occurred across parts of Minnesota and Iowa. Thomas Grazulis documents eight tornadoes. He gave three of these and F4 rating and one and rated one an F5. He denotes as well these were probably tornado families. The F5 traveled 50 miles in Kossuth, Hancock and Winnebago Counties in Iowa and ending in Faribault, MN. 14 were killed and 100 injured. Grazulis documents that 10 farms in Kossuth County “were entirely leveled and swept away, with five or more having little left to show that a farm once existed on the site.”

September 22: In 2001, an F3 tornado tracked for eight miles across Clay County, NE, and it caused extensive damage to three farmsteads.

Photo from NWS Hastings.

September 23:  An F2 tornado skipped its ways 17 miles across parts of Columbiana County, OH on this day in 1926. Near Summitville, a rural properties in four townships accrued $30,000 in damages. The funnel was described as having “a wall of boiling, grayish water.” A two-year-old boy was killed and three others injured near Glasgow.

September 24: On this day in 2001, one of the most significant tornadoes to ever hit the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area occurred. Per the Storm Prediction Center (SPC), this F4 is one of only two in records going back to 1950 within the state of Virginia. The other one occurred on August 4, 1993, in Petersburg. Read the full summary here!

Twister Tales! 

Zach Reichle and I dug pretty deep into the February 10, 1959 St. Louis F4 tornado and wrote a detailed summary about it. This twister plowed through the metro area in the dead of night and tragically 21 people were killed. Here is an excerpt from the summary:

“At 1:48 am, a Trans-World Airline Constellation airplane with 24 passengers and five crew members took off from St. Louis Lambert Airport en route to Kansas City. They began to experience the supercell that produced the tornado only minutes after takeoff, approximately 15 miles west of St. Louis. Per an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on February 10, 1959, the control tower saw the storm on the radar and directed them around it. Per the newspaper, “The pilot replied to the tower that the storm was one of the worst he had ever experienced and that if he had not been detoured, ‘we probably would have flipped over.’”

That was only the beginning of what was to be a very long night in St. Louis.

Article of the Week! 

Distillery spill floods streets of Portuguese town with wine

Imagine walking down the street and all of a sudden 600,000 gallons of wine are flowing your way! This is what happened last week in São Lourenço do Bairro, Anadia when two vats burst at a distillery. There were no injuries and some reports of damage. The wine was gathered up and taken to a wastewater treatment plant. No reports of how many people were able to grab a glass and snag some wine before it was hauled away. 🙂 

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