To answer your question as to why they didn't leave it's because a tornado is unpredictable at best when it comes to where it will travel. At the end of the day the best you can hope for is an educated guess and even then the odds you'll guess correctly are fairly low, even for professionals. Case in point the El Reno tornado from 2013, not only was it the biggest tornado ever at 4.2 km in diameter it is thus far the only tornado to have taken the lives of professional storm chasers. Being out on the road with no protection other than the flimsy metal of a vehicle is one of the worst places to be. Specifically because most deaths from tornadoes are caused by flying debris. A piece of debris traveling at speeds an EF4 or EF5 tornado is capable of launching can, in some instances pierce concrete. That's why they say the interior most room of a house is the safest since most tornadoes are EF3 or lower. Being out on the road is close to a death sentence even if the tornado isn't close because the debris flying at high speeds can make any distance moot. I would definitely recommend that you watch some videos on the aforementioned El Reno tornado to get some perspective on the dangers faced.
You should see the tornado that happened in Colorado in the mountains. It was in Denver. The odd thing about was it was going the opposite way of every other tornado. it was in high altitude in the mountains. Not a very light place for a tornado. It was also very, very very strong. It was an anomaly.
Mr. Houser, Sir, thank you for the great reactions and informative video choices. I didn't see any musical reactions in your playlists, have you considered doing any? I can recommend an AMAZING acappella group called "Voiceplay." Their talent is epic, and best of all, they're copyright free! I don't know what kind of music you like best, but I can recommend my favorite song by them, "Valhalla Calling." My second favorite song by them is "Hoist The Colors" which I sleep to, and thus have listened to it tens of thousands of times. No joke. Last year, Jan-Nov, I listened to it over 43,500 Times. I'm not kidding, Spotify kept track. Maybe you can just check them on your own, see if you like them. They also do an amazing cover of "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica. There are currently four core members, Layne Stein-Beatboxer, Eli Jacobsen (pronounced "El-lee)-Tenor and rock god, Cesar De La Rose-another tenor, and king of sass, and Geoff Castellucci-bass, but not an ordinary bass. His range is mind blowing. He also has a solo channel. I think you'll like them! 💙
I live in tornado alley. You learn how to put your fear on levels. Tornado Watch: "not so worried, we get plenty of these a year" Tornado Warning: "Ok, we've dealt with this plenty of times too, we're good" Sirens come on: "Oh crap time to go in the bathroom or closet and pray...taking a couple shots too!" Trust me, many of us want to drive away, but the tornadoes are too strong and change directions easily. It sucks to be stuck in your home, but these things can hurl cars a quarter of a mile away.
I'm lucky enough to have my favorite chair facing a southwest window. A tornado warning for me means "pay attention outside". If it turns green or I can see something brewing then it's time to haul ass downstairs. I live nowhere near tornado alley btw. For whatever reason Pittsburgh has had more than twice our usual share of yearly twisters already. Had 3 warnings, 2 of which made tornados within 5 miles of me.
@@HeavenhoundGiuseppe Yeah you never know where they may turn up or how much damage they will do, best to play it safe. You guys may not have many tornadoes, but you sure make up for it in snowfall. Spent a Thanksgiving there with a college friend and got stuck for days...Great sandwiches there.
Also, you may not have a guarantee that you can outpace a tornado. Residential streets with cross traffic? You'll either be going an careful average of 20mph, getting in an accident that stops you cold out in the open. I wouldn't want to be a panicked and distracted driver amongst panicked and distracted drivers.
@@HeavenhoundGiuseppeas someone who grew up in Pittsburgh, Im shocked to see the level of tornados in the area. I lived there for 16 years and I think we had maybe one or two tornado warnings, which is way less than the many watches and warnings Ive gone through after moving to Dixie Alley. I hope you and your friends and family are safe, and Im glad youre keeping yourself safe :)
You never know if the tornado will change direction and your car will end up in its path. According to the US National Weather Service, tornadoes have been known to throw cars as far as a mile. My dad was in a car that was thrown by one when he lived in Nebraska. He was trying to get away from it, it changed directions and the next thing he knew his car was in the middle of a field. He was lucky not to be badly hurt.
That's where I say "God was with him, or an angel." 'Cause ain't no tornado going to let a person live if they toss them usually, especially if it can lift and throw a the vehicle you're in.
@@phonokilleddigitalstar for sure! It spent a long time (relatively for a tornado) over each house it hit in the neighborhood. Combined with the wind speeds it basically scoured them off the foundations.
@@andreagurney7797 I’m from Ohio, never really been through a tornado that hit my house. There have been plenty of warnings that we took shelter in our basement bathroom. As a kid the tornado sirens would scare the Sh*T out of me as a kid. They still do but I’ve have become a bit nulled, after traveling outside of tornado alley and the US, mostly because of how many times they set them off. It’s like every Fkucing storm. I mean I get it and we should absolutely take it seriously but it’s hard when the weather doesn’t seem all that severe but if it’s severe I want to hind.
@@phonokilleddigitalstar I have no doubt! It's like the earthquake warnings here in Utah. Granted we don't have sirens for those but they're always predicting that the big one is around the corner. We've only had a couple tornadoes around here that I remember. My grandmother was born in Canton and spent most of her early childhood in Ashtabula. Never really thought about her being around tornadoes but she must have been. Lol
A supercell is a strong severe thunderstorm that is capable of producing tornados, large hail, and damaging wind gusts. Supercells have rotating updrafts which is what allows tornados to form.
Supercells have a horizontal rotation in them caused in part by wind shear (winds blowing in different directions at different altitudes). When a cold dry air mass comes barreling out of Canada or the Rockies and plows into a warm wet air mass trying to move north from the gulf, you get cold air aloft with the warm wet air under it. Violent thunderstorms form at this boundary. Within them you have a war between the warm air mass and the cold one when as the warm air wants to rise and the cold air mass laying on top of it wants to sink. When the warm air manages to poke a hole in the cold to rise to freedom and it's going through that mesocyclone, the horizontal rotation becomes vertical and much tighter and it's twister time.
@MurdogYTThis was actually a huge part of the Joplin death toll. There was a high school graduation ceremony letting up right before it hit, so a lot of people were stuck in their cars in the path and couldn't find shelter. You mentioned the 2013 Moore tornado, iirc that one had a meteorologist who suggested to drive south if you were in Moore and caused a huge traffic jam from people evacuating last minute.
@@MoreAdamCouser Some supercells sometimes have characteristics of other storms Hybrid cells are one of them. A hybrid cell has characteristics of squalls which are storms that goes on for miles and miles and miles while at the same time have characteristics of supercells But that’s just the beginning of this nightmare because there’s one supercell I want to talk about There was a supercell near and over greensburg with a nasty surprise call the greensburg EF5. It is a monster storm that should be reacted with respect. The video includes a 1.7 mile wide wedge that swallowed 95% of the town of greensburg
There's usually not enough warning to get in the car and leave. And even if you do you often can't see the tornado to know where to drive to get away from it. Thanks so much for these videos. Exposure helps save lives and makes people be more wary when there is a threat by being reminded of these storms strength
@@novacat5037 And change direction rapidly. Just not worth the chance. These people did exactly what they were supposed to. In this case, it wasn't enough.
Next, tornado you need to react to is Greensburg Kansas in May 2007, it’s another EF 5 it was rain wrapped and it come at night, it’s base was a 1.7 miles wide (2.7 KM )
10:59 One thing with tornadoes is sometimes they spawn unexpectedly - already *inside* a thunderstorm system- don't travel any predictable path, and have varied speeds and widths. Notice how that tiny rope tornado widened into a quarter-mile monstrosity in minutes? It also hurls metal, debris, dirt, and anything else while tearing up roads. Zero chance you wanna just "hope" you can both outrun it in a car and predict where it'll be directed next. This is why all the known advice is "take shelter". Anywhere without glass, as interior and underground as possible. Sometimes it means shelter from the winds. And sometimes, unfortunately, it means collapsing walls. But "under debris" is often judged to better than "picked up like a paper doll and absolutely shredded by a vicious vortex full of pain".
You should check into the tragedy of the Twistex storm chaser team. They WERE running and these guys were extremely experienced storm chasers. Their last tornado made a turn and came at them. Where do you run to? If the tornado decides to change course there is no safe place to run to.
That story is extremely sad to me, RIP Tim Samara and team. I remember reading about it a year or so later and it sounded like Tim or whoever he was with got sloppy compared to his normal cautiousness, doing pretty much EVERYTHING he would have not done. Then I saw how the path of the tornado changed. I love him in Storm Chasers next to Reed Timmer he was my favorite. Actually, Tim Samara was my top favorite as he did really seemed to care for his fellow storm chasers.
El Reno pretty much broke every tornado track rule in the book. The sudden change of course and how it widened so fast. The course was not predictable. Every chaser pretty much was caught off guard, not just Tim and Twistex. I agree. It goes to show how even the most experienced, safety conscious chaser could find themselves in an extremely dangerous situation.
I witnessed this one in person, and the horrible aftermath. The reason most people don't have storm shelters is because in that area there is about 20" of top soil before you hit solid limestone bedrock, making blasting out a shelter incredibly expensive. Things have improved greatly since then in how storm shelters are installed, and cost. At the time, we hadn't seen a storm that strong, and a lot of the other tornadoes are wrapped in rain, making them hard to distinguish. If you get in a car and drive the wrong way, you may end up in the tornado, in a car, worst place to be. Remember, back then you only had the local news, or radio to warn you. Now days, people have instant access to weather, radar, apps that warn you, etc. and yes, a storm that size you can see coming, it does make sense to get in the car and drive away from it.
8:50 the reason why we usually don’t go in the car and leave is because tornadoes are usually faster than a car, and not giving the fact of flying debri, BUT one of a family of the Jarrell Tornado did get in a car and left, and the family survived, plus living in the U.S, highways are the worse case scenario, many people try and crowd under overpasses (which you shouldn’t do) which causes traffic
A friend of my was in that storm shelter. He said there was no way to explain how loud this particular tornado was and he had been through a few. It’s so incredibly sad and scary.
The Igos were my aunt/uncle and cousins. They had all come home from being in town and made it in the house with moments to spare. Unfortunately there was no surviving the storm above ground. In this part of Texas there is limestone below the soil that makes it very expensive to dig, hence why most people around here don’t have basements or other below ground shelter. My uncle owned a business in town that sold parts for restoring classic cars. On their property they had lots of basically shells of old cars that they would salvage parts from. As far as we could tell none of those cars/pieces were ever found, at least not parts recognizable as being from a car. There were a couple of their cars that that had been restored that they drove that were recognizable in the aftermath. In spite of the devastation, there were a couple of kittens that survived, covered in mud up against the foundation of the house. We adopted one.
I’d also add that in 1989 there was a small tornado that came through the main part of town that mostly followed the highway. When the sirens started they decided to go home instead of staying in town, thinking it would follow roughly the same path as the previous tornado. It initially seemed to be traveling parallel to the highway but then turned and headed straight for the subdivision.
it was a living hell, to quote one of the first responders "there was an ear over here and a finger over there, we had to piece them together to identify them." People were literally torn apart by the tornado
Lived in the town that the movie ‘night of the twisters’ was based on. 8 tornadoes in one night. Spent the whole night in the basement. Wife working night shift as a nurse, spent most of the night under a desk holding an infant that couldn’t be moved from the hospital room to more secure shelter.
Don't know if anyone else answered your question at 2:54 but a supercell is a rotating thunderstorm capable of producing tornadoes. Not all of them do, thankfully.
It's fair that you feel so strongly about the families driving out of harm's way. In reality, it just doesn't happen that way. If a town does take a big hit from a tornado, the first thing the authorities will do, once it's over, is shut down all entrances to the town. The mindset that we have is that a tornado is only going to hit what's in front of it. Most tornadoes are only a sliver of a mile wide, so the chance of my house being hit, is very slim. I have had an EF3 travel 400 metres South of my house. It tore up a lot of sh!t, but my house wasn't affected. The natural thing for those families to do, was to just hunker down and hope they didn't take a direct hit.
it’s kinda just a freak accident. most people survive strong tornados in interior rooms of their house but this storm was so uniquely tragic in the stalling movement of the tornado. that kind of thing doesn’t happen very often, tornados are unpredictable and a lot of people don’t have experience on what to do in certain situations. you never know until it happens to you one day!
In addition, even if the tornado goes in a straight line and you have enough to escape by car (which you should not try to do), having a whole town or city try to evacuate will cause traffic jams, and people will be hit by the tornado in their cars. You have a better chance surviving a tornado about anywhere other than your car.
This. Even the wind cone around most tornadoes is fairly small. But a ridiculously powerful multivortex one like this has a much larger wind field, so the heavy destruction is wider than expected even from the base diameter. If it had blown over their house at the speed it was going, they likely would have survived as that interior room wouldn't only have had to remain sturdy enough for 30 seconds or so. The fact that it sat there for whole minutes is what killed them. That and the right turn it made right there. Had it kept on its more SW course they'd have been further out in the wind field. Could have been smacked by a sub vortex of course, but even better odds of surviving. They just had the worst possible luck. Getting to their home, abscent real time info on its track, was the smartest choice. If they had known it was going to cut right near their house, they could have just hung out a half mile away or so in their truck. But even know there is no real time way do make those decisions. It just unfolds to fast and far to dynamically. These things can stop and hard 90 degree turn on a dime in a really eerie way. They can also lift up, leave a house or two fine, and then go right on destroying everything.
You don't know how long it takes for a family to get organized, Get into the car and leave. 10 minutes, A lot of times is not enough. especially, for a tornado that spans an entire mile. Plus, even if you aren't being affected by the tornado winds you still have to contend with the debris being flung around. If you aren't fast enough and the tornado catches you while you are in a car, you are not surviving.
Exactly. Storm chasers who have all of the radar equipment, and are experienced in trying to stay safe distances from tornados have died because of the unpredictability in tornado paths and the inabilty to outrun or outmanuever that path change.
My cousins decided to outrun a tornado (Wichita Falls, TX, 1979). They were driving up to 100 mph to get away. Their neighborhood was decimated, but their home was spared. It was almost a week before we were able to reach our family members who were all OK.
@belledoc6249 Do not do this! all it takes isone good gust of wind at high that speed to send you barreling into a ditch at a hundred miles per hour. If the tornado doesn't get you. The the road might.
Having lived in Texas and being in two tornadoes, you cannot just get into a car and leave. The tornadoes can change directions, speed, intensity, etc. cars are more likely to be lifted and thrown by the tornadoes and that’s likely the reason the sought refuge in a house.
Tornadoes usually travel West to East. This Jarrell tornado did just the opposite. If one is coming towards me, I'm not going to be a sitting duck, I'm jumping in my truck and heading South. I'm in Killeen, about 35 miles North of Jarrell.
Adam, one of the *worst* places to be in a tornado is in your car. Jarrell was an outlier, in hindsight perhaps people *could* have driven fast enough to get away from it because it moved so slowly, but normally they can go as fast or faster than a car can drive (see some of the storm chaser video footage where they are flooring it to get away). Also, they can change direction on a dime, you can think you're driving away from it (we were taught that if we had to, to drive away perpendicular to it), next minute it's roaring up on you. So no, getting into a car and trying to drive away very rarely is a wise idea. What breaks my heart and makes me vow to never live in that part of the country is that they have in general no underground shelters. I grew up in houses with basements, we always had somewhere to hide during tornado warnings. I can't conceive of living somewhere where you didn't even have an outdoor underground shelter (like in the Wizard of Oz) to get into!
These poor people all mostly did what they were "supposed" to do. Most of them were where they were supposed to be to be the most safe. It's drilled into most people that you DO NOT leave a well built home to try to outrun a tornado. Being in a vehicle during a tornado can literally be more dangerous than laying in a ditch outside - same with being inside of a mobile home. The guys who lived in a mobile home did what they were supposed to do - go to a well built house near you (or a ditch if no structure is near) but this tornado got them anyway and they might have been okay had they stayed home. Sometimes doing the safest and "correct" thing ends up just not being enough or ends up being the worst thing to do in hindsight. The descriptions of what happened to these people and animals is so horrifying. It's what made me start viewing tornadoes more as.. spontaneously appearing, mobile human blenders. Nature is just so f'ed up sometimes.
@@GavinTilling I definitely agree! It's just one of those things that REALLY solidifies how dangerous being in a car or mobile home is during a tornado, lol, like - it's literally suggested it's safer to *be outside* in a ditch than it is to be in a car/mobile home. It's scary to even think about! I lived in a mobile home for a while and man, that was always just a terrifying thought to me. I'd get major anxiety every single tornado watch. 🤦🏻♀
The logic of not driving makes sense at a basic level, a tornado is trying to make things move; your house is not intended to move; so a tornado will have a harder time getting it to move. Meanwhile a car is intended to move and a tornado wants to make stuff move so it’s going to be real easy for the tornado to pickup the car and make it move. But even ignoring that logic this tornado was very different with its path going towards the southwest instead of the typical path towards the northeast so for families that have experienced tornados all their lives they may have seen the tornado and thought it formed past them and only went for shelter to avoid any potential debris or were watching the tornado and only realized it was coming their way after it would be too late to try and make a solo escape. Heck we can only make assumptions about what some of the people who died did but it’s entirely possible one of them was confident in their knowledge of a typical tornado and didn’t make it inside.
You say well built, but all of the debris I've seen in incidents in the USA, including the larger buildings, are made of wood; It's enough to make one think that quarries don't exist there. I know they do for civil infrastructure such as multi-lane roads and tunnel linings, but seriously? Can't spare some cinder blocks and concrete fore a house?
@@phoenixbda6164 Anyone can purchase concrete or cinder. It’s not just for the government or state. But building homes out of only concrete is not a very good idea. Concrete is very strong in compression, but is very weak in tension. You can pull a cinder block apart with your bare hands. Wood is very effective in tension and solid in compression. That’s why the frame of the house is wood but the foundation and slab is concrete. But in a tornado the wind plus suction power could just disintegrate the concrete, sure the same would happen to the wood but there’s no point if neither will hold up and one is significantly more expensive then the other. Sure rebar would help but that suction could just rip the house apart still. And when I say well built I’m not talking about material, which is still important I’d rather have a house made of oak and hickory than a house made of Balsawood. But the real mater of build quality is in the anchors to the foundation. If it’s anchored well only the most intense of storms will destroy the house. But if it’s not built well the house could literally be lifted off the foundation and thrown.
Another problem with driving away from a tornado, is they're frequently in very rural areas where you might run out of road after the tornado changes directions and ends up on top of you. I did have a business acquaintance who lived out in the country in Kansas SW of Kansas City. He had a full basement, but when saw the tornado heading right for his house he knew he had to get out. So he got in his car and drove away. It turned out that the funnel cloud had picked up the giant propane tank that provided fuel to heat the house in winter and dropped in in the basement where he would have been sheltering. Not a common situation though.
Supercell thunderstorms are rotating thunderstorms, but don't necessarily produce tornadoes, they can cause hail to fall or damaging winds with their strong updrafts
The recommended thing to do during a tornado is to find immediate shelter in an interior room of a building, usually thats your home, but the most safe is to shelter underground, though many homes lack a basement or storm shelter. Sadly in this case, your chances of surviving above ground were practically zero
I actually live in Central Texas and dated a guy from Jarrell when I was in college, which was a few years before this tornado. It was and still is a lovely small town with a large portion of the community embracing their Czech heritage. (It's one of the best places to find homemade kolaches!) Those people were sheltering in their houses because that is what you do in Texas when tornadoes come. If you can't get to an underground storm shelter, you go to the innermost area of the house with the most pipes in the wall (usually your bathroom), get in the bathtub and cover yourself with whatever you can find. They didn't have time to go anywhere else. I remember that day and tornadoes were popping up all along the I-35 corridor. While tornadoes are common in our area, F5s are rare and no one thought it would be so destructive. It was a complete tragedy, but Jarrell has rebuilt since then and is a thriving community today.
My daddy was part of one crew that went to assist that area's "clean-up" teams. That was the first time I'd ever seen him not want to talk about what he saw. Truly horrific.
You can not outrun a tornado.. We are taught to GET OUT OF THE CAR and take shelter in a ditch, My mother and I were ON 35 going from Dallas to San Antonio on the day of the Jarell tornado, about 10 miles before we hit Jarrell Tx it was green skys, hailing and raining so hard I pulled in at a truck stop and parked and waited about 20/30 mins before getting back on I 35, had we continued on we may have had a bad outcome. I couldn't see so I got under shelter while the tornado tore up Jarrell...You do not know where that tornado is going.. it can change direction and speed on a dime. we were within a few miles of the tornado.
You CAN outrun a tornado. When this tornado hit the double creek estates, it had slowed to only 1-2 miles per hour. Sorry, but do the math. 80 mph in a car will always beat a 1-2 mph tornado, even though most are not that slow. Most travel between 50-65 mph. Even still, my car is still faster.
@@excalibur1812 Yeah and tornadoes come with insane wind, hail, rain, and satellite tornaodes. You never outrun a tornado. Check out the video of the news van trying to outrun a tornado. It fails.
In these tornado videos I have learned that they really have some beef with 35! All through TX and OK it keeps making appearances. I think it was two years ago now (or just one? time is a flat circle) that one meandered across 35 in Round Rock. During evening rush hour.
@@excalibur1812 Your car *is* faster, in good conditions on an open road in a linear direction. If you know where the storm is and that it will stay there, sure. But tornados are unpredictable. They aren't an object that just moves on the ground like an animal. They can jump and land somewhere else, much faster than your car. They can move along the road, or cut you off. You might not be the only one on the road, and can get stuck in traffic with other people thinking like that. Or the tornado could have destroyed the road or bridges in front of you. When you are in a tornado you *cannot see*. And you almost never really know exactly where the tornado is, where it has been, where it is going or how fast. Even if you do, it is unpredictable and changes rapidly. Beside all that, there is often hail and airborne debris. Trying to predict and outrun a tornado is one of the dumbest things you can do. Sure, you might outrun it, but you also might not. You won't know until it is too late. On the other hand, if you shelter in the safest part of your house, you are very unlikely to be harmed. Tornados are rarely large, and the area they affect is fairly small. Your house will likely be fine. If you *are* hit, most tornados will not kill you if you stay somewhere well built and interior. Yeah, this was an anomaly. It was particularly large, particularly strong, and particularly slow. If these people had run, they probably would have survived, and no one was surviving in shelter, but that's just it; an anomaly. Sheltering is the safest option, though outrunning the tornado is technically possible some of the time.
An F5 tornado is a pretty rare event, most F1-3's are very survivable. It is likely they were not expecting an F5 and that's one reason why they didn't leave, but tornados are also erratic and unpredictable so you could also easily drive right into it while trying to escape, especially at night when you can't see where it is. The thing that always puzzles me is why so few homes in tornado alley have storm cellars or other shelters. So many people are moving into that area and none of the newer homes have any shelters at all.
I have wondered that, too. I have heard some say the bedrock is too shallow so they can't dig, and I have heard some say the water table is too shallow so they can't dig because they get water. Believe you me, if I lived there, I would get a storm shelter if I had to blast or run a sump pump 24/7. I live in tornado alley, and my home has a basement!
Unfortunately in my area, the sad truth is that it costs more to build a storm shelter. So they don't get built. People rely on the "well it probably won't happen to this house" mentality. A ton of homes around here don't even have basements.
@@rhysplaysvirtual Yes, sad but true. They should pass a law that cities have to build community shelters ever so many blocks in towns like that. But they figure the small number of deaths are cheaper than the shelters, In these days, with more F5s every year, that sort of logic won't work.
I live about 30 miles south of Jarrell in a town named Georgetown. I vividly remember this tornado event. We have friends that live in Jarrell. This was an insane tornado. After living through what is known as the day of the killer tornadoes in Kentucky where my family had to spend the night in our basement with at least 5 tornadoes on the ground at the same time within 10 miles 9f our home all night long. I would gladly do that again versus living through the Jarrell tornado. That tornado tore all of the asphalt on Interstate 35 off of the lanes for hundreds of yards.
I've developed somewhat of a special interest in tornadoes over the last few months & I still shiver when I see that Dead Man Walking photo. And hearing him say it practically walked into Jarrell was bone chilling. I've even 𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒅 that line before, but it gets me every time.
I'm not sure how old ya are and maybe they still do it today, but the sirens at school when you're 7, get down and put your head between your knees and protect your head. From what?! Ever since I could remember All of my nightmares were of tornadoes and sharks! However I also have an interest in tornados lol. I've been in 3 and I like the videos much better lol !!! I still love the movie twister and waiting on the new one.
One family did escape in their car, but that is unusual. This tornado was atypical, moving to the southwest instead of the northeast, so following normal procedures would have been a bad idea. You couldn't predict what this storm was going to do. Meteorologists were baffled by this storm as it was so atypical. The mother and daughter in the trailer sheltered by their father both survived, but the father was found the next day, dead. This tornado skinned cattle, skinned people caught in it, and some were ripped to pieces. The community has bounced back, though and now there are many storm shelters in place.
Thank you for info about the daughter of the mother that was found alive by the tree. I get that the video was about the storm itself, but it would have been nice if the narrator had included that detail considering he told the fate of the mother.
Man, you are hitting areas today that I have been or lived in. I had just moved to Texas February 1997 (about 35 miles south of Austin) My husband worked in North Austin at the time, said they could see it. This was an extremely frightening day, for me. The following year, my area of Texas went through a 100 year flood, in my town. Oddly, it was October 17, 1998. I was born and raised in Northern California, I will take an earthquake any day over a tornado. I was living just south of San Francisco (born and raised) October 17, 1989. I had two brother on the toll plaza of the Bay Bridge when it hit. It took the more than 8 hours to get home, they had to drive all the water around San Francisco Bay, all the bridges were shut down. Mother Nature….crazy,
The wind from tornados can be so strong that there has been footage of a playing card logged into a tree and a piece of wood going through a concrete curb. Also, running away from a tornado in a car is a bad idea. Tornados can change directions, move faster than your car, or spawn multi vortexes or satellite tornados that can hit you. In the end, it's better to stay in an interior room/under ground, or if you're caught outside in a tornado, run into a ditch and lay down. If you have a car and are caught in a tornado you pull over into a ditch and either a get out the car and lay in the ditch or put the car in park leave it on and cover your face. In the end, trying to outrun a tornado when their is shelter nearby will usually be fatal they can move at highway speeds or faster.
This tornado is legit a once in a life time occurrence with how rare it is. Ef5 - indescribably rare South east travelling storms - this happens very very very rarely. so everything about this whole event was just absurd and honestly a nightmare come true. I live in Sweden and it’s way to cold to have a tornado happen but im extremely intrigued by this type of stuff.
You never try to outrun a tornado in a car, some tornadoes can reach up to 80mph in rare cases the current record is 96. Cars and become easily stuck, caught in traffic, and tossed. Your best option during a tornado is to go to your nearest shelter or basement. If neither are available you go into the most interior room in your house with no windows, and cover yourself with a mattress and blankets. The only time you try to run from a tornado is if your in a mobile home and you have no other options. Hiding in a hollow or deep creek bed is a far better option to driving.
According to the NWS “What makes a supercell unique from all other thunderstorm types is that it contains a deep and persistent rotating updraft called a mesocyclone. If the environment is favorable, supercell thunderstorms can last for several hours.” If you live in the area long enough you can sometimes feel, smell, or taste bad weather coming. In Nebraska I’ve witnessed it going from not a cloud in the sky to a strong thunderstorm in 5 minutes.
I lived nearby in North Austin and that tornado leveled the entire town down to the foundations of most buildings. New cheaper subdivisions are being built in Jarrell and I can't believe people would want to live in that area.
Here in NJ we don't get many tornados and they are small but they are still always scary as all hell. When the sky turns that particular shade of green (that's right, I said green), the leaves turn as the air changes, and your lizard brain starts sending anxiety signals through you.. it's always scary.
Please check out the El Reno tornado from 2013 that was one that changed the rules and unfortunately claimed the lives of 3 storm chasers one chaser being the original dedicated to storms and safety. The super cell caught them off guard and had multiple vortexes and the chasers community had multiple storm chasers there waiting for it almost like a warning of what was to come
A friend of mine lost everything in that tornado. She had been through other big tornadoes, but she said she had never experienced anything like this one. It was absolutely terrifying
Have friends who lived in Jarrell. Still do. What was unique was that there were concrete slabs that the tornado had sucked the copper water piping out of. Not just wiped everything from the top of the slab but where the pipe exited the slab it created enough suction to strip the copper totally out of the concrete.
This was maybe one of the scariest things I remember from Ft Hood, we watched that storm run south, backwards, from our motor pool. I'm also a survivor of the 1970 Lubbock tornado which was one of the storms Dr Fujita used to make the Fujita Scale these were rated by.
I lived in Jarrell at the time. I was at work and my sister in law called me and told me there was a tornado in Jarrell. My kids were there home from school and staying with the neighbor across the street from us. I immediately left work and headed the twenty miles north from my work place to home and halfway there, my gas pump went out. I had no choice but to sit in my car while the hail and driving rain pelted my truck. Once I got home, I found out the tornado was headed straight for our home, but lifted up less than a quarter mile away. My kids knew all the families of those who died as they went to school with the kids. Sad!
A lot of times, a car is not a safe place to be. Tornadoes can travel surprisingly fast, as fast if not faster than a car, especially in traffic or on windy, rural roads. And their paths are often unpredictable. They can stop, speed up, curve without any warning. For example, a tornado appears to be traveling parallel to the road you're on, so you decide to stop and watch it pass by. Before you know it, it has turned directions and begins barreling straight toward the road you're parked on, at 60 miles per hour. You don't have time to get back in your car and outrun it. You're done. Oh, and just for reference, the fastest tornado recorded traveled across the ground at more than 90 miles per hour (145 km/h). Trying to outrun them is never advised, and it's better to seek shelter in a sturdy structure. That family was deeply unfortunate that the tornado randomly came to a standstill right over their home, and ripped it to shreds for several minutes. That is not a normal circumstance.
I live about an hour from Jarrell, and I remember this day vividly. My husband was on his way to work and narrowly missed being in another tornado that hit NW Austin that day. We were taught to take shelter in a sturdy building, in the basement or storm shelter, or in a windowless room in the center of the house, usually a bathroom or closet. We were told never to try to out run a tornado in our car. And if we were in our car, we are supposed to lie flat in a ditch. My extended family survived a violent 😊tornado in Wichita Falls, TX, in the late 1970s. Many of them chose to take their cars and leave. It's only been in the last 10 years that I've heard meteorologists telling people to leave their homes if they don't have an underground shelter when it's an especially violent tornado. I've lived in Texas for 30 years now. I've seen one small tornado, about 10 miles from my home, and several waterspouts (a tornado over water) and dust devils.
The sanctuary building of my church in Houston, Texas was totally destroyed in a wind storm in 2003. It was made of brick, but not particularly well-constructed. All four walls were turned into rubble, the oak pews were splintered and the organ pipes were twisted and thrown around. The weather experts evaluated the storm and said it wasn't a tornado, just a storm cell. Luckily, no one was there, and the school building right next door, with children inside, was largely undamaged.
I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, I drive through Jarrell a lot on my way South to Austin. Every time I see the sign on I-35 for Jarrell I think about this. When we Texans hear the word “supercell,” we know it’s an extremely strong storm and we need to keep an eye on the weather. Because that’s the type of storm tornadoes come from. I hear watch and I’m like eh life as normal, just keep my phone on me. I hear warning and I’m looking at the radar to determine if I’m affected. I hear sirens, I’m heading into the tornado shelter. Mine is above ground though, but better than not having one. We are trained though not to be driving if there’s a tornado. They change direction too unpredictably. It’s better to be in the house sheltering than risk driving and getting caught in it. And remember, this tornado is 3/4 mile wide. The time it would take to know you’re in its path and gotta go, getting in the car, and being limited by where roads lead… you’re done. We don’t act unless we know it’s near us anyways. I’ve always been terrified of tornadoes and take them extremely seriously. My boyfriend on the other hand heard one was a mile from his house and went outside with pizza while it obliterated a restaurant and the parking lot at his job, with some damage to the building but minor. A friend of mine was at our amusement park (Six Flags) when a tornado headed for the park. Few people know where shelters in the park are. I do from having worked there and directed her where to go. Thankfully it didn’t hit the park. But yeah, that’s just our reality here.
oh. another reason why cars are terrible to be in during a tornado is that tornadoes can travel at highway speeds and turn very erratically. that and they can just grow in size and suddenly overcome vehicles. now imagine a traffic jam because a news reporter told them to drive away. that already happened, another reason why driving during a tornado is so dangerous. people are sitting ducks waiting to get crushed like an empty soda can. ever look into the El Reno tornado? storm chasers that had decades of experience lost their lives because they were trying to actually get AWAY from that thing due to how it just kept growing in size and was moving very fast and erratic. and they were experts. now imagine a casual inexperienced family trying to get away from the tornado. yeah. driving away is not a good idea
@@characterblub2.0 fr. rip to the twistex team at that time. and again, they were professionals with radar, equipment, and decades of experience. so imagine a family with zero equipment, knowledge, and probably a car full of screaming kids with a mind clouded by panic. absolutely not
I use to work in the oil field in Colorado. In the summer, virtually everyday we’d get tornado warnings in the afternoon . One day we stopped in Limon Colorado for lunch. After lunch we headed to the next service call when we came up on some storm chasers along one of the dirt roads and stopped to talk to them when they asked where we were coming from and we told them Limon. We were asked what condition the town was in because a twister had headed that way. We said there was no issue there a half hour ago but we went back to see and the town was virtually gone. There was no sign whatsoever on the cafe we ate at an hour earlier.
"End up in Egypt" hilarious, You know?When the bad weather is coming, it has this eerie.Calm feeling and dark clouds.You don't know which way it's coming from but you know it's coming
The tornado that hit my hometown in 2011 first hit a roofing manufacturing facility then a scrap metal recycling center before passing straight through the middle of the city. The amount of debris that day was incredible. You really should check out the Tuscaloosa Tornado of April 27th 2011.
again, as ppl have commented on previous reacts, cars are insanely bad to be in during a tornado and trying to get your entire family into one can take far too long. ever wanna know what one that's been hit looks like? crush a can. crumple it. and then put holes in it. yeahh they're not good to try to be in. especially since many tornadoes can travel at highway speeds. jarrell was an anomaly in that it kinda just stalled out at EF5 strength over the town. like imagine wind speeds of more than 200 mph just sitting over you for like 10 minutes. everything is ground down like it was sand-blasted due to the debris within the tornado
They don't know the tornado will hit their houses, the best forecasting is usually "It is likely going to hit or come near X town" and that is 5 minutes before it hits. They also don't know how fast it is moving, they can change size rapidly, they can change direction, etc. If everyone hopped in their cars and tried to drive out of town then they would just be stuck in traffic and while a tornado may not hit many homes it will certainly pass over some roads and a car is a lot less safe than a house, having traffic jams all around town would be way worse. It is also very hard to tell if a tornado is coming at you or not, in any footage of people with tornados coming right at them, it just looks like it isn't moving at all. Some also move much faster than cars, there are plenty of videos of people trying to out-drive them and just needing to give up and run into a house or hide under a bridge or in a ditch or whatever. Like yes if they all knew this tornado was moving unnaturally slow and exactly what houses it would pass over and that it was about to grow 5x in size right before hitting their neighborhood then yes just the people who would be hit getting in cars and driving away would be ideal. In reality if there is anything they did wrong it was not knowing which two houses nearby had storm shelters, one of those storm shelters had 16 people in it so clearly many households knew they had one and to go there for tornados.
My grandmother had a small tornado in her area a few days ago. All the various cats she feeds suddenly decided they were *indoor* cats for a while, lol. No one got hurt (that I know of) but something kind of funny happened. One of their neighbors lost his garage, but the car IN the garage, was somehow fine. My dad says when he was a kid, they had a big tornado that took a farmers grain silo, picked it up, and set it down right way up on a *different* farm without spilling any of the grain.
Supercells sometimes contain things called Thunder Bumpers. You can tell if a cloud is a Thunder Bumper because it's super tall, reaching really high into the sky. One way to tell if a Supercell is going to produce a tornado, it will form a giant "wall" of clouds. Tornados can form in the corner.
Ps.. never run from a Tornado. You can not predict which way it's going to go... or how big it can get. Get you and your loved ones into a basement / storm cellar and ride it out there. If a storm the size of the F-5 at Jarrell... there's no place to run. No place to hide. Hunker down and pray. That's it.
I live in Northeast, Georgia USA. We've had a couple of tornadoes come very close to hitting our home, but none were over an EF3 level. I couldn't imagine living in Tornado Alley and having to deal with this on any given day..
There is a video taken during the huge Alabama tornado outbreak where a group of people took refuge in the walk in cooler at a Tuscaloosa gas station. Everyone survived but the video is terrifying. When they opened to door and walked out of the cooler the building was gone, along with most of the buildings nearby. I drove though one of the hardest hit areas near Birmingham several months later and it was heartbreaking. The good news is the warning systems and radar technology have really driven down the casualty rate.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that video is actually from the Joplin tornado, but the point still stands regardless. I can't imagine how terrifying it was to be in that cooler. I was a mere mile away from the Tuscaloosa tornado sheltering with my friend on the University of Alabama campus. We had gone out to a few bars the night before on McFarland Blvd and when we came out after the tornado passed, the streets were unrecognizable. It literally looked like an atomic bomb had been detonated. I moved to Indiana two years later and I've been a basket case every time the mere possibility of tornadoes is mentioned in the weather reports. 🙃
"Dead man walking" was a Native American tale originally, since they're the ones who were first on the plains, it only makes sense they would have verbal history about tornados.
They did not leave because this was early days and they were told to shelter in place. This is why they have changed both building codes and what people are told to do in these situations. Get underground or out of the way.
@@alisonflaxman1566 look at news reports they at least say to get underground if you can and part of the problem in Moore? was that they had told people to go south and there were traffic jams. So in a house or in a car a house is better but it is situational awareness and that is harder to help people understand
@@Whateverhasbeenmynameforyears Not sure you understood what she said, but it’s a known fact even to this day that fleeing a tornado in a car is a dangerous thing to do. Jarrell was just an insanely rare exception. The families who lost their lives would have had to know ahead of time that the tornado was going as slow as it did, but of course it’s impossible to know that until after it happens.
@@WanderingRoethat was the situational awareness part. And they have tried to send people away and it is not better because congested roadways are the worst targets.
I have been living in Tornado Alley (North Texas) since the 1970s and have only seen one tornado (1995), so that alone makes me feel thankful, but I have seen the aftermath of destruction that twisters cause while driving to nearby towns that were hit. Scary stuff!
As for you asking why they didn't drive away ... we're always told that we're safer to go to the innermost interior of a building/home, because tornados don't follow a straight and narrow path. For that reason, it's best to avoid being thrown around in the winds like a toy.
People usually are safe in their homes, whereas in a car, you can easily be swept away. Those who begin to drive have no idea if the tornado is heading directly towards them at 75mph or not. Cars are not that strong, and tornadoes love throwing them hundreds of yards.
My grandmother was born in Jarrell and her grandfathers barn that she was born in was flattened in this tornado. A lot of black families lost a lot of legacy infrastructure. It was scary. I lived 10 mins away from this town for most of my life so it’s crazy seeing how much it’s grown from that to what it is now.
The Jarrell Texas Tornado aka "The Dead Man Walking". Wooo that twister when I first saw it on reports and first hand accounts send chills down my spine, like a literal folk story coming to life right before our eyes
Growing up, we were always taught that if a tornado is coming, you take shelter immediately. A car is the worst place you can be, so the best thing you can do is get to an inner room or underground. For a lot of tornados, even if there’s damage to the house, sheltering in place can save you. With F5 tornados, though, they can just level everything. My family went to Joplin when I was a kid to deliver donated supplies, and it was so surreal and sad to see the landscape change from wooded areas and buildings to just flat, leveled nothingness all at once. I’ll never forget that. It was truly humbling
I'm a Texan, and one of the craziest things I've seen here was when I was about 12 years old in 1984 in Garland, Texas. I was outside, and spanning a range of about 60 degrees, I saw 5 tornadoes on the horizon all at once. Another crazy thing that happened when I was 9, a tornado went right by my house in Livingston, Texas. It didn't do much of anything to my house, but the houses right across the street were demolished.
The most amazing thing to me was how it peeled the pavement off the road, leaving only the dirt. I have seen that in any tornado. My good friend sent me photos of the once streets. Unbelievable
My family was in this tornado. I saw the dead man myself. Thankfuly my mom and grandpa were out of town, and I was on the otherside of the the town from where it hit. We were family friends of the Igos, and related to the Smiths, as well. No one knew how bad this storm was till it hit. Sometimes, the wind shear a mile out from the tornado makes driving dangerous, and the debris can circle around in the air up to 5 miles out from the storm. This is why, growing up, we are always taught to seek shelter in a basement, hallway closet with four walls, or a tub (in that order.) But in bad cases like this one, no one knew how bad it could grind up the houses where they were not safe. This one was special, too, because it was so slow and strong but also spun in a different direction than normal tornados. There were also the multiple spawned tornados previous to it reaching Jerrl, so we didn't think it would grow that bad, and it would at worst a EF3.
If you notice the map when the first family is hit, the tornado is sitting on top of the road that would take them out of town. Also, because tornados are known to be unpredictable due to the chaotic winds circling, especially in a massive wedge tornado like this one, would toss the car like a toy. THE SCARY PART most tornados move at a steady fast pace. The family probably decided to Stand their ground because it would hit them but keep moving. This monster, pretty much stalled and eviscerated everything in its reach. The thought of being on the middle of a F5 tornado that’s moving at such a slow pace is terrifying. You’re basically going to be like those fluffy yellow chicks that get swallowed by that grinder. (If you know that old video, then you know…. Those old school peta awareness emails.
I live about 50 miles from Jarrell. I know someone who was one of the first police to reach the site. They had to shoot a bunch of animals they found there that had no skin. There was a heap of dead humans in a ditch, not terribly recognizable. The pictures were chillingly horrible to me, because usually there is debris, and this time it was eerily clean; the houses were scraped off the earth, and so were parts of the roads. Those people that died went to the best shelter they could find, which was their homes. You can’t tell what direction a tornado will go next, so trying to outguess the direction to flee is hard. There was very little development out near Jarrell at that time, so no community storm shelters. They didn’t make dumb decisions, they just got terribly unlucky.
8:35 I should add, during that time, the general advise to tornadoes was not that much understood and guidelines on what to do were not as comprehensive as it is today. People were advised to stay at home and hide in the most interior part of the house or the bathroom/tub during a tornado event. Also, unlike today where mobile devices have internet access and can see live updates on radar, they do not have those technologies back then, so going out of the tornado's way using a car and not knowing its path was a 50:50 gamble too. I get why the government at that time gave out the advise. Also, the Jarell tornado was unique in its own way, going on a S-SW path that was unusual for most tornadoes in the US usually going N-NE.
10:48 Most of the time getting in a car and trying to drive out of the path of the tornado isn't a good idea, as you will not be able to get out of the way fast enough. And if you can, there is no guarantee you aren't in the path still. Also, tornadoes have proven to be unpredictable in their pathing and how wide the winds reach. A car could get thrown by the wind even if you are hundreds of feet from the tornado. A house is obviously a better cover. Houses built without storm shelters that close to where tornadoes happen is just dumb negligence to me. Build every home with an underground storm shelter.
I live just 8 miles south of where the Jarrell tornado hit. I didn't get direct tornado damage at my home but got lots of debris that was sucked 20,000-30,000ft up into the storm then dropped. Items as big as washing machines fell to the ground as far away as San Antonio, 100 miles to the south.
The reason why you are not advised to drive from a tornado is because everyone would do it, and then there would be traffic which would leave you a sitting duck in your car. The likely hood of dying from tornadoes while in a car is far higher than in your home.
8:30 back then, they'd never seen a slow moving tornado that was this powerful. Most strong tornadoes travel at highway speeds, so conventional wisdom stated that if there's a tornado to go home and ride it out and do not try to outrun the tornado in your car. This tornado flipped that whole concept on its head, as most of the families who sheltered in place above ground died and a family who outran the tornado in their car survived unscathed.
Not gonna lie, this one hit *actually* hard. 😖 The Jarrell tornado is the most terrifying one imo. Thanks for keeping these tornado reactions coming, it’s a good day when we see an upload from you 👏
Man shielded his wife and daughter, gave his life for them, and because of that, they were the only 2 people above ground to have walked away from that alive. Man died like a hero, I can not imagine a better way to go out of this world than protecting the ones you love the most. Rest in peace.
The fact that this one sat in place and churned with 260 mile an hour winds wake up blender from hell for over 3 minutes over a residential neighborhood is mind blowing. Without being too graphic First Responders reported human bodies were reduced to the consistency of cat food
From as young as two or three years old in the U.S., we’re taught that a tornado siren means: 1.) a tornado is actively forming or visible; 2.) the safest place is as low as you can get; 3.) underground is best; 4.) but a room with no windows on the first floor will do in a pinch; 5.) and, barring that, if it has to be an exterior room with a window, the bathtub provides the most solid protection on 5 sides, even more so if you can pull a twin bed mattress in over yourself in it. Seriously, I don’t know a single kid who wasn’t taught to prioritize their shelter options this way in the event of a tornado, and I don’t even live *near* Tornado Alley. I live in the Northeast region between NYC and Philly. And we still take tornado preparedness pretty seriously, even though most tornadoes that touch down here are F-0/F-1. They *can* be worse, though much more rare, so we’re still taught what to do to be as safe as we can. And we’re constantly warned that a car is just a big fishbowl made of glass as far as safety is concerned. That glass will not do shit to protect you when the tornado suddenly changes direction without warning and the 2x4 it’s chucking around at 90 mph launches through your windshield like a frickin missile. We’re also taught not to shelter under bridges because tornado wind loves the wind tunnel effect bridges create and hiding under one is basically inviting a tornado to snatch you out from under it. If you’re caught outdoors in a tornado, the best advice is supposedly still to get as low as you can in a ditch, if possible, tuck your head in, cover it and your neck with your arms to insulate yourself from scouring debris that could kill or paralyze you. (It would be nice if someone could do better than this for outdoor advice, ngl, because this is terrifying.)
Hi Adam, you might be interested in watching the video of John Force’s frightening crash that happened June 26, 2024. It was a serious explosion/crash. Mr. Force had already crossed the finish line at over 300MPH. John Force is a legend in the NHRA. He actually won the race before his engine exploded. Lots of prayers being sent up for Mr. Force to recover
Other than rain wrapped, another type of tornado that you can encounter is a night tornado since you cannot even see it. I live in San Antonio, Texas and was on my way back from Houston when I encountered a strong storm that had cars slow to a crawl. I had my phone on a holder on the dash and saw a tornado icon on the weather radar on my phone. I started to scan the sky in the direction that the icon was and saw the beginning of a tornado forming near the town of Sealy, Texas. This was in the middle of the night and the only way I could even see it was due to the lightning flashes of the storm. I literally had nowhere to go since the section of I-10 that I was on was under construction and there were barriers on either side of the 2 lane wide westbound section that I was on. Was one of the most terrifying tornado encounters I ever had. You never want to be caught in the open in a situation like that.
Living on the edge of tornado alley all my life, especially owning a home without a basement, I’ve always thought about getting a football helmet or motorcycle helmet, something like that to put in my closet where I always have my little emergency stuff in case of a bad storm. I’ve always felt a little silly about it, but damn, I think I will now!
I have watched many tornado videos, but this tornado is on a different level. I get chills watching videos about this one. A tornado can pick up a full-size truck and add it to the debris circling the funnel. They can also suddenly accelerate to 70+ mph. A car is generally the last place you want to be. If everyone tries to drive away, you will be stuck in a traffic jam.
I was born in Houston Texas and we had a bunch of them and hurricanes. You can’t really get in the car and drive because they can instantly switch directions and they’re fast man. It’s like a sit and pray thing. Also, many tornadoes don’t get a tornado warning before hand. If you do it’s usually just a few minutes and that’s if you see it. It’s almost impossible and if you do leave, you could hit it, if it switches. It’s not that easy to just leave brother. Scary stuff. It’s also very hard to know where they’re moving unless you’re a professional. Many small towns in the country usually have one highway in and out. Yeah it’s hard to get away with little or no warning. At least with hurricanes we have days notice. One Tornado hit across the street but missed our side. Moved to Atlanta 2 yrs ago and had 1 hit a mile away 2 months ago. Fun stuff
I live in tornado Alley... " Why don't you just get in the car and leave?"... Supercell storms are HUGE.. sometimes MILES wide and form in lines ... Sometimes hundreds of miles long. Tornados spun up in those storms are unpredictable. They can manifest anywhere in that storm.... Anywhere in the line of storms.... Can be there one second... dissipate and reform miles away... Formed tornadoes can "jump" too - on the ground, lift, and touch down hundreds of feet left or right, front or behind its current path. So which way would you drive?.... Can you even drive fast enough with inches of rain falling in minutes... Hail... up to the size of cantaloupes hurling through the air by 100+ mph winds. We had a F-1 pass within 1000 ft of my home yesterday... And didnt even lose leaves on our trees. Yet people 1/2 mile away lost everything. Thankfully no deaths or injuries. Statistically it is safer to shelter in place... Get to the lowest point, basement/storm shelter if you have one, if not .. get away from doors/windows and put as many walls between you and the storm. Protect your head and neck and PRAY!
The level of destruction in this tornado is rare. It is much safer to be inside than outside or even in a car. Also, you don't know which roads are clear to drive or what direction the tornado is moving. Although there will always be risk if riding out a storm, these people weren't insane to shelter inside when there was no underground access. Sadly, this tornado not only came to visit but hung around for way too long.
It is said by first responders that between all the dead people, as well as the cattle from a nearby field, the entire area of destruction smelled like flesh and blood. Both people and cattle alike were skinned, mutilated, de-limbed, and in some cases reduced to nothing but bits and pieces. There were multiple cars that were never recovered, not even a single discernable piece, because they'd been entirely blended into shards. It killed 27 people but only injured 12, and that's because no one in the direct path or even close to the direct path survived that wasn't below ground. Truly hellish destruction.
Only cool cats follow pls 🎉 www.twitch.tv/adamcouser
If you aren't streaming you should be studying Adam.
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To answer your question as to why they didn't leave it's because a tornado is unpredictable at best when it comes to where it will travel. At the end of the day the best you can hope for is an educated guess and even then the odds you'll guess correctly are fairly low, even for professionals. Case in point the El Reno tornado from 2013, not only was it the biggest tornado ever at 4.2 km in diameter it is thus far the only tornado to have taken the lives of professional storm chasers.
Being out on the road with no protection other than the flimsy metal of a vehicle is one of the worst places to be. Specifically because most deaths from tornadoes are caused by flying debris. A piece of debris traveling at speeds an EF4 or EF5 tornado is capable of launching can, in some instances pierce concrete. That's why they say the interior most room of a house is the safest since most tornadoes are EF3 or lower. Being out on the road is close to a death sentence even if the tornado isn't close because the debris flying at high speeds can make any distance moot.
I would definitely recommend that you watch some videos on the aforementioned El Reno tornado to get some perspective on the dangers faced.
You should see the tornado that happened in Colorado in the mountains. It was in Denver. The odd thing about was it was going the opposite way of every other tornado. it was in high altitude in the mountains. Not a very light place for a tornado. It was also very, very very strong. It was an anomaly.
Mr. Houser, Sir, thank you for the great reactions and informative video choices. I didn't see any musical reactions in your playlists, have you considered doing any? I can recommend an AMAZING acappella group called "Voiceplay." Their talent is epic, and best of all, they're copyright free! I don't know what kind of music you like best, but I can recommend my favorite song by them, "Valhalla Calling." My second favorite song by them is "Hoist The Colors" which I sleep to, and thus have listened to it tens of thousands of times. No joke. Last year, Jan-Nov, I listened to it over 43,500 Times. I'm not kidding, Spotify kept track. Maybe you can just check them on your own, see if you like them. They also do an amazing cover of "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica. There are currently four core members, Layne Stein-Beatboxer, Eli Jacobsen (pronounced "El-lee)-Tenor and rock god, Cesar De La Rose-another tenor, and king of sass, and Geoff Castellucci-bass, but not an ordinary bass. His range is mind blowing. He also has a solo channel. I think you'll like them! 💙
Yes the daughter lived
I live in tornado alley. You learn how to put your fear on levels. Tornado Watch: "not so worried, we get plenty of these a year" Tornado Warning: "Ok, we've dealt with this plenty of times too, we're good" Sirens come on: "Oh crap time to go in the bathroom or closet and pray...taking a couple shots too!" Trust me, many of us want to drive away, but the tornadoes are too strong and change directions easily. It sucks to be stuck in your home, but these things can hurl cars a quarter of a mile away.
FRRRR
I'm lucky enough to have my favorite chair facing a southwest window. A tornado warning for me means "pay attention outside". If it turns green or I can see something brewing then it's time to haul ass downstairs.
I live nowhere near tornado alley btw. For whatever reason Pittsburgh has had more than twice our usual share of yearly twisters already. Had 3 warnings, 2 of which made tornados within 5 miles of me.
@@HeavenhoundGiuseppe Yeah you never know where they may turn up or how much damage they will do, best to play it safe. You guys may not have many tornadoes, but you sure make up for it in snowfall. Spent a Thanksgiving there with a college friend and got stuck for days...Great sandwiches there.
Also, you may not have a guarantee that you can outpace a tornado. Residential streets with cross traffic? You'll either be going an careful average of 20mph, getting in an accident that stops you cold out in the open. I wouldn't want to be a panicked and distracted driver amongst panicked and distracted drivers.
@@HeavenhoundGiuseppeas someone who grew up in Pittsburgh, Im shocked to see the level of tornados in the area. I lived there for 16 years and I think we had maybe one or two tornado warnings, which is way less than the many watches and warnings Ive gone through after moving to Dixie Alley.
I hope you and your friends and family are safe, and Im glad youre keeping yourself safe :)
You never know if the tornado will change direction and your car will end up in its path. According to the US National Weather Service, tornadoes have been known to throw cars as far as a mile. My dad was in a car that was thrown by one when he lived in Nebraska. He was trying to get away from it, it changed directions and the next thing he knew his car was in the middle of a field. He was lucky not to be badly hurt.
That's where I say "God was with him, or an angel." 'Cause ain't no tornado going to let a person live if they toss them usually, especially if it can lift and throw a the vehicle you're in.
Except that one guy who survived being tossed 30 miles. That was weird
Yeah, remember Tim Samaras and his crew were thrown in their car. Even the Weather Channel suburban was rolled in El Reno.
@@christopherjunkinsGod really said: I DIDNT GIVE YOU PERMISSION TO DIE
@@christopherjunkins So why did the El Reno tornado fly at the Twistex team at 175mph then?
In a normal tornado, they would have been safer in their home than a car. This one just happened to sit over this neighborhood and shred it.
Yeah that's the incredibly horrible sad thing about all of this.
Not only it looks like the house took a direct hit.
@@phonokilleddigitalstar for sure! It spent a long time (relatively for a tornado) over each house it hit in the neighborhood. Combined with the wind speeds it basically scoured them off the foundations.
@@andreagurney7797 I’m from Ohio, never really been through a tornado that hit my house. There have been plenty of warnings that we took shelter in our basement bathroom. As a kid the tornado sirens would scare the Sh*T out of me as a kid. They still do but I’ve have become a bit nulled, after traveling outside of tornado alley and the US, mostly because of how many times they set them off. It’s like every Fkucing storm. I mean I get it and we should absolutely take it seriously but it’s hard when the weather doesn’t seem all that severe but if it’s severe I want to hind.
@@phonokilleddigitalstar I have no doubt! It's like the earthquake warnings here in Utah. Granted we don't have sirens for those but they're always predicting that the big one is around the corner. We've only had a couple tornadoes around here that I remember. My grandmother was born in Canton and spent most of her early childhood in Ashtabula. Never really thought about her being around tornadoes but she must have been. Lol
A supercell is a strong severe thunderstorm that is capable of producing tornados, large hail, and damaging wind gusts. Supercells have rotating updrafts which is what allows tornados to form.
Damnnnnn
Supercells have a horizontal rotation in them caused in part by wind shear (winds blowing in different directions at different altitudes). When a cold dry air mass comes barreling out of Canada or the Rockies and plows into a warm wet air mass trying to move north from the gulf, you get cold air aloft with the warm wet air under it. Violent thunderstorms form at this boundary.
Within them you have a war between the warm air mass and the cold one when as the warm air wants to rise and the cold air mass laying on top of it wants to sink. When the warm air manages to poke a hole in the cold to rise to freedom and it's going through that mesocyclone, the horizontal rotation becomes vertical and much tighter and it's twister time.
@MurdogYTThis was actually a huge part of the Joplin death toll. There was a high school graduation ceremony letting up right before it hit, so a lot of people were stuck in their cars in the path and couldn't find shelter. You mentioned the 2013 Moore tornado, iirc that one had a meteorologist who suggested to drive south if you were in Moore and caused a huge traffic jam from people evacuating last minute.
@@MoreAdamCouser
Some supercells sometimes have characteristics of other storms
Hybrid cells are one of them. A hybrid cell has characteristics of squalls which are storms that goes on for miles and miles and miles while at the same time have characteristics of supercells
But that’s just the beginning of this nightmare because there’s one supercell I want to talk about
There was a supercell near and over greensburg with a nasty surprise call the greensburg EF5. It is a monster storm that should be reacted with respect. The video includes a 1.7 mile wide wedge that swallowed 95% of the town of greensburg
or a simpler way is rotating storms
There's usually not enough warning to get in the car and leave. And even if you do you often can't see the tornado to know where to drive to get away from it. Thanks so much for these videos. Exposure helps save lives and makes people be more wary when there is a threat by being reminded of these storms strength
Also some tornados can move at 70+ mph
@@novacat5037 And change direction rapidly. Just not worth the chance. These people did exactly what they were supposed to. In this case, it wasn't enough.
To quote Ron White, it’s not if the wind is blowing. It’s What the wind is blowing.
300mph winds will do damage without any debris
@@noahg4369 Exactly. This video literally alluded to it.
@@noahg4369yea which just means more debris moving faster…
Next, tornado you need to react to is Greensburg Kansas in May 2007, it’s another EF 5 it was rain wrapped and it come at night, it’s base was a 1.7 miles wide (2.7 KM )
I like his Timothy Treadwell joke. His father told him he'd never be shit. He was wrong.
10:59 One thing with tornadoes is sometimes they spawn unexpectedly - already *inside* a thunderstorm system- don't travel any predictable path, and have varied speeds and widths. Notice how that tiny rope tornado widened into a quarter-mile monstrosity in minutes? It also hurls metal, debris, dirt, and anything else while tearing up roads.
Zero chance you wanna just "hope" you can both outrun it in a car and predict where it'll be directed next.
This is why all the known advice is "take shelter". Anywhere without glass, as interior and underground as possible. Sometimes it means shelter from the winds. And sometimes, unfortunately, it means collapsing walls. But "under debris" is often judged to better than "picked up like a paper doll and absolutely shredded by a vicious vortex full of pain".
You should check into the tragedy of the Twistex storm chaser team. They WERE running and these guys were extremely experienced storm chasers. Their last tornado made a turn and came at them. Where do you run to? If the tornado decides to change course there is no safe place to run to.
That's right! And Tim, head of the Twistex team, always, always preached safety first. And like you said, they had many years of experience.
That's why the most important thing you can do as a storm chaser is have a escape plan
That story is extremely sad to me, RIP Tim Samara and team. I remember reading about it a year or so later and it sounded like Tim or whoever he was with got sloppy compared to his normal cautiousness, doing pretty much EVERYTHING he would have not done. Then I saw how the path of the tornado changed. I love him in Storm Chasers next to Reed Timmer he was my favorite. Actually, Tim Samara was my top favorite as he did really seemed to care for his fellow storm chasers.
@@phonokilleddigitalstarYeah,it was very sad.....
Reed Timmer is a wildman,nerves of steel. He's gotten some amazing footage this year!
El Reno pretty much broke every tornado track rule in the book. The sudden change of course and how it widened so fast. The course was not predictable. Every chaser pretty much was caught off guard, not just Tim and Twistex. I agree. It goes to show how even the most experienced, safety conscious chaser could find themselves in an extremely dangerous situation.
I witnessed this one in person, and the horrible aftermath. The reason most people don't have storm shelters is because in that area there is about 20" of top soil before you hit solid limestone bedrock, making blasting out a shelter incredibly expensive. Things have improved greatly since then in how storm shelters are installed, and cost. At the time, we hadn't seen a storm that strong, and a lot of the other tornadoes are wrapped in rain, making them hard to distinguish. If you get in a car and drive the wrong way, you may end up in the tornado, in a car, worst place to be. Remember, back then you only had the local news, or radio to warn you. Now days, people have instant access to weather, radar, apps that warn you, etc. and yes, a storm that size you can see coming, it does make sense to get in the car and drive away from it.
8:50 the reason why we usually don’t go in the car and leave is because tornadoes are usually faster than a car, and not giving the fact of flying debri, BUT one of a family of the Jarrell Tornado did get in a car and left, and the family survived, plus living in the U.S, highways are the worse case scenario, many people try and crowd under overpasses (which you shouldn’t do) which causes traffic
I agree but staying in a house is also death much better chance in a car
A friend of my was in that storm shelter. He said there was no way to explain how loud this particular tornado was and he had been through a few. It’s so incredibly sad and scary.
The Igos were my aunt/uncle and cousins. They had all come home from being in town and made it in the house with moments to spare. Unfortunately there was no surviving the storm above ground.
In this part of Texas there is limestone below the soil that makes it very expensive to dig, hence why most people around here don’t have basements or other below ground shelter.
My uncle owned a business in town that sold parts for restoring classic cars. On their property they had lots of basically shells of old cars that they would salvage parts from. As far as we could tell none of those cars/pieces were ever found, at least not parts recognizable as being from a car. There were a couple of their cars that that had been restored that they drove that were recognizable in the aftermath.
In spite of the devastation, there were a couple of kittens that survived, covered in mud up against the foundation of the house. We adopted one.
I’d also add that in 1989 there was a small tornado that came through the main part of town that mostly followed the highway. When the sirens started they decided to go home instead of staying in town, thinking it would follow roughly the same path as the previous tornado. It initially seemed to be traveling parallel to the highway but then turned and headed straight for the subdivision.
it was a living hell, to quote one of the first responders "there was an ear over here and a finger over there, we had to piece them together to identify them." People were literally torn apart by the tornado
Oh my gosh that is horrifying those poor people :(
@@Oklahoma_is_me i myself can only imagine how horrifying it must have been to see it
@@peanutmwo6001 yeah :(
Lived in the town that the movie ‘night of the twisters’ was based on. 8 tornadoes in one night. Spent the whole night in the basement. Wife working night shift as a nurse, spent most of the night under a desk holding an infant that couldn’t be moved from the hospital room to more secure shelter.
@@VnvmcNeb Grand Island?
Don't know if anyone else answered your question at 2:54 but a supercell is a rotating thunderstorm capable of producing tornadoes. Not all of them do, thankfully.
It's fair that you feel so strongly about the families driving out of harm's way. In reality, it just doesn't happen that way. If a town does take a big hit from a tornado, the first thing the authorities will do, once it's over, is shut down all entrances to the town. The mindset that we have is that a tornado is only going to hit what's in front of it. Most tornadoes are only a sliver of a mile wide, so the chance of my house being hit, is very slim. I have had an EF3 travel 400 metres South of my house. It tore up a lot of sh!t, but my house wasn't affected. The natural thing for those families to do, was to just hunker down and hope they didn't take a direct hit.
it’s kinda just a freak accident. most people survive strong tornados in interior rooms of their house but this storm was so uniquely tragic in the stalling movement of the tornado. that kind of thing doesn’t happen very often, tornados are unpredictable and a lot of people don’t have experience on what to do in certain situations. you never know until it happens to you one day!
In addition, even if the tornado goes in a straight line and you have enough to escape by car (which you should not try to do), having a whole town or city try to evacuate will cause traffic jams, and people will be hit by the tornado in their cars. You have a better chance surviving a tornado about anywhere other than your car.
This. Even the wind cone around most tornadoes is fairly small. But a ridiculously powerful multivortex one like this has a much larger wind field, so the heavy destruction is wider than expected even from the base diameter. If it had blown over their house at the speed it was going, they likely would have survived as that interior room wouldn't only have had to remain sturdy enough for 30 seconds or so. The fact that it sat there for whole minutes is what killed them. That and the right turn it made right there. Had it kept on its more SW course they'd have been further out in the wind field. Could have been smacked by a sub vortex of course, but even better odds of surviving. They just had the worst possible luck. Getting to their home, abscent real time info on its track, was the smartest choice. If they had known it was going to cut right near their house, they could have just hung out a half mile away or so in their truck. But even know there is no real time way do make those decisions. It just unfolds to fast and far to dynamically. These things can stop and hard 90 degree turn on a dime in a really eerie way. They can also lift up, leave a house or two fine, and then go right on destroying everything.
You don't know how long it takes for a family to get organized, Get into the car and leave. 10 minutes, A lot of times is not enough. especially, for a tornado that spans an entire mile.
Plus, even if you aren't being affected by the tornado winds you still have to contend with the debris being flung around.
If you aren't fast enough and the tornado catches you while you are in a car, you are not surviving.
Exactly. Storm chasers who have all of the radar equipment, and are experienced in trying to stay safe distances from tornados have died because of the unpredictability in tornado paths and the inabilty to outrun or outmanuever that path change.
My cousins decided to outrun a tornado (Wichita Falls, TX, 1979). They were driving up to 100 mph to get away. Their neighborhood was decimated, but their home was spared. It was almost a week before we were able to reach our family members who were all OK.
@belledoc6249 Do not do this! all it takes isone good gust of wind at high that speed to send you barreling into a ditch at a hundred miles per hour.
If the tornado doesn't get you.
The the road might.
Having lived in Texas and being in two tornadoes, you cannot just get into a car and leave. The tornadoes can change directions, speed, intensity, etc. cars are more likely to be lifted and thrown by the tornadoes and that’s likely the reason the sought refuge in a house.
Tornadoes usually travel West to East. This Jarrell tornado did just the opposite. If one is coming towards me, I'm not going to be a sitting duck, I'm jumping in my truck and heading South. I'm in Killeen, about 35 miles North of Jarrell.
Adam, one of the *worst* places to be in a tornado is in your car. Jarrell was an outlier, in hindsight perhaps people *could* have driven fast enough to get away from it because it moved so slowly, but normally they can go as fast or faster than a car can drive (see some of the storm chaser video footage where they are flooring it to get away). Also, they can change direction on a dime, you can think you're driving away from it (we were taught that if we had to, to drive away perpendicular to it), next minute it's roaring up on you. So no, getting into a car and trying to drive away very rarely is a wise idea. What breaks my heart and makes me vow to never live in that part of the country is that they have in general no underground shelters. I grew up in houses with basements, we always had somewhere to hide during tornado warnings. I can't conceive of living somewhere where you didn't even have an outdoor underground shelter (like in the Wizard of Oz) to get into!
These poor people all mostly did what they were "supposed" to do. Most of them were where they were supposed to be to be the most safe. It's drilled into most people that you DO NOT leave a well built home to try to outrun a tornado. Being in a vehicle during a tornado can literally be more dangerous than laying in a ditch outside - same with being inside of a mobile home. The guys who lived in a mobile home did what they were supposed to do - go to a well built house near you (or a ditch if no structure is near) but this tornado got them anyway and they might have been okay had they stayed home. Sometimes doing the safest and "correct" thing ends up just not being enough or ends up being the worst thing to do in hindsight.
The descriptions of what happened to these people and animals is so horrifying. It's what made me start viewing tornadoes more as.. spontaneously appearing, mobile human blenders. Nature is just so f'ed up sometimes.
Laying in a ditch isn’t that bad really, depending on its depth and width it could be a solid option.
@@GavinTilling I definitely agree! It's just one of those things that REALLY solidifies how dangerous being in a car or mobile home is during a tornado, lol, like - it's literally suggested it's safer to *be outside* in a ditch than it is to be in a car/mobile home. It's scary to even think about! I lived in a mobile home for a while and man, that was always just a terrifying thought to me. I'd get major anxiety every single tornado watch. 🤦🏻♀
The logic of not driving makes sense at a basic level, a tornado is trying to make things move; your house is not intended to move; so a tornado will have a harder time getting it to move. Meanwhile a car is intended to move and a tornado wants to make stuff move so it’s going to be real easy for the tornado to pickup the car and make it move.
But even ignoring that logic this tornado was very different with its path going towards the southwest instead of the typical path towards the northeast so for families that have experienced tornados all their lives they may have seen the tornado and thought it formed past them and only went for shelter to avoid any potential debris or were watching the tornado and only realized it was coming their way after it would be too late to try and make a solo escape. Heck we can only make assumptions about what some of the people who died did but it’s entirely possible one of them was confident in their knowledge of a typical tornado and didn’t make it inside.
You say well built, but all of the debris I've seen in incidents in the USA, including the larger buildings, are made of wood; It's enough to make one think that quarries don't exist there. I know they do for civil infrastructure such as multi-lane roads and tunnel linings, but seriously? Can't spare some cinder blocks and concrete fore a house?
@@phoenixbda6164 Anyone can purchase concrete or cinder. It’s not just for the government or state. But building homes out of only concrete is not a very good idea. Concrete is very strong in compression, but is very weak in tension. You can pull a cinder block apart with your bare hands. Wood is very effective in tension and solid in compression. That’s why the frame of the house is wood but the foundation and slab is concrete. But in a tornado the wind plus suction power could just disintegrate the concrete, sure the same would happen to the wood but there’s no point if neither will hold up and one is significantly more expensive then the other. Sure rebar would help but that suction could just rip the house apart still. And when I say well built I’m not talking about material, which is still important I’d rather have a house made of oak and hickory than a house made of Balsawood. But the real mater of build quality is in the anchors to the foundation. If it’s anchored well only the most intense of storms will destroy the house. But if it’s not built well the house could literally be lifted off the foundation and thrown.
Another problem with driving away from a tornado, is they're frequently in very rural areas where you might run out of road after the tornado changes directions and ends up on top of you. I did have a business acquaintance who lived out in the country in Kansas SW of Kansas City. He had a full basement, but when saw the tornado heading right for his house he knew he had to get out. So he got in his car and drove away. It turned out that the funnel cloud had picked up the giant propane tank that provided fuel to heat the house in winter and dropped in in the basement where he would have been sheltering. Not a common situation though.
Also if everyone does that, there will be traffic which could cause even more problems.
You could try offroading that might work and would be a better option than just staying and hoping to survive
Supercell thunderstorms are rotating thunderstorms, but don't necessarily produce tornadoes, they can cause hail to fall or damaging winds with their strong updrafts
" It's not that the wind is blowin, It's what the wind is blowin "
- ron white
The recommended thing to do during a tornado is to find immediate shelter in an interior room of a building, usually thats your home, but the most safe is to shelter underground, though many homes lack a basement or storm shelter. Sadly in this case, your chances of surviving above ground were practically zero
I actually live in Central Texas and dated a guy from Jarrell when I was in college, which was a few years before this tornado. It was and still is a lovely small town with a large portion of the community embracing their Czech heritage. (It's one of the best places to find homemade kolaches!) Those people were sheltering in their houses because that is what you do in Texas when tornadoes come. If you can't get to an underground storm shelter, you go to the innermost area of the house with the most pipes in the wall (usually your bathroom), get in the bathtub and cover yourself with whatever you can find. They didn't have time to go anywhere else. I remember that day and tornadoes were popping up all along the I-35 corridor. While tornadoes are common in our area, F5s are rare and no one thought it would be so destructive. It was a complete tragedy, but Jarrell has rebuilt since then and is a thriving community today.
2:51 Count yourself lucky in the fact that you don't know what a supercell is.
My daddy was part of one crew that went to assist that area's "clean-up" teams. That was the first time I'd ever seen him not want to talk about what he saw. Truly horrific.
You can not outrun a tornado.. We are taught to GET OUT OF THE CAR and take shelter in a ditch, My mother and I were ON 35 going from Dallas to San Antonio on the day of the Jarell tornado, about 10 miles before we hit Jarrell Tx it was green skys, hailing and raining so hard I pulled in at a truck stop and parked and waited about 20/30 mins before getting back on I 35, had we continued on we may have had a bad outcome. I couldn't see so I got under shelter while the tornado tore up Jarrell...You do not know where that tornado is going.. it can change direction and speed on a dime. we were within a few miles of the tornado.
You CAN outrun a tornado. When this tornado hit the double creek estates, it had slowed to only 1-2 miles per hour. Sorry, but do the math. 80 mph in a car will always beat a 1-2 mph tornado, even though most are not that slow. Most travel between 50-65 mph. Even still, my car is still faster.
The thing is, you DONT know at the time. This slow tornado was unusual @@excalibur1812
@@excalibur1812 Yeah and tornadoes come with insane wind, hail, rain, and satellite tornaodes. You never outrun a tornado. Check out the video of the news van trying to outrun a tornado. It fails.
In these tornado videos I have learned that they really have some beef with 35! All through TX and OK it keeps making appearances. I think it was two years ago now (or just one? time is a flat circle) that one meandered across 35 in Round Rock. During evening rush hour.
@@excalibur1812 Your car *is* faster, in good conditions on an open road in a linear direction. If you know where the storm is and that it will stay there, sure. But tornados are unpredictable. They aren't an object that just moves on the ground like an animal. They can jump and land somewhere else, much faster than your car. They can move along the road, or cut you off. You might not be the only one on the road, and can get stuck in traffic with other people thinking like that. Or the tornado could have destroyed the road or bridges in front of you. When you are in a tornado you *cannot see*. And you almost never really know exactly where the tornado is, where it has been, where it is going or how fast. Even if you do, it is unpredictable and changes rapidly. Beside all that, there is often hail and airborne debris. Trying to predict and outrun a tornado is one of the dumbest things you can do. Sure, you might outrun it, but you also might not. You won't know until it is too late. On the other hand, if you shelter in the safest part of your house, you are very unlikely to be harmed. Tornados are rarely large, and the area they affect is fairly small. Your house will likely be fine. If you *are* hit, most tornados will not kill you if you stay somewhere well built and interior. Yeah, this was an anomaly. It was particularly large, particularly strong, and particularly slow. If these people had run, they probably would have survived, and no one was surviving in shelter, but that's just it; an anomaly. Sheltering is the safest option, though outrunning the tornado is technically possible some of the time.
An F5 tornado is a pretty rare event, most F1-3's are very survivable. It is likely they were not expecting an F5 and that's one reason why they didn't leave, but tornados are also erratic and unpredictable so you could also easily drive right into it while trying to escape, especially at night when you can't see where it is. The thing that always puzzles me is why so few homes in tornado alley have storm cellars or other shelters. So many people are moving into that area and none of the newer homes have any shelters at all.
I have wondered that, too. I have heard some say the bedrock is too shallow so they can't dig, and I have heard some say the water table is too shallow so they can't dig because they get water. Believe you me, if I lived there, I would get a storm shelter if I had to blast or run a sump pump 24/7. I live in tornado alley, and my home has a basement!
Unfortunately in my area, the sad truth is that it costs more to build a storm shelter. So they don't get built. People rely on the "well it probably won't happen to this house" mentality. A ton of homes around here don't even have basements.
@@rhysplaysvirtual Yes, sad but true. They should pass a law that cities have to build community shelters ever so many blocks in towns like that. But they figure the small number of deaths are cheaper than the shelters, In these days, with more F5s every year, that sort of logic won't work.
@kimmccarthy7747 haven't there been little to no F5s since 2013?
@@alphawolf7417 I thought there was at least one this year. But even if that is true, the next one could happen at any time.
I live about 30 miles south of Jarrell in a town named Georgetown. I vividly remember this tornado event. We have friends that live in Jarrell. This was an insane tornado. After living through what is known as the day of the killer tornadoes in Kentucky where my family had to spend the night in our basement with at least 5 tornadoes on the ground at the same time within 10 miles 9f our home all night long. I would gladly do that again versus living through the Jarrell tornado. That tornado tore all of the asphalt on Interstate 35 off of the lanes for hundreds of yards.
I've developed somewhat of a special interest in tornadoes over the last few months & I still shiver when I see that Dead Man Walking photo. And hearing him say it practically walked into Jarrell was bone chilling. I've even 𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒅 that line before, but it gets me every time.
I'm not sure how old ya are and maybe they still do it today, but the sirens at school when you're 7, get down and put your head between your knees and protect your head. From what?! Ever since I could remember All of my nightmares were of tornadoes and sharks!
However I also have an interest in tornados lol. I've been in 3 and I like the videos much better lol !!! I still love the movie twister and waiting on the new one.
One family did escape in their car, but that is unusual. This tornado was atypical, moving to the southwest instead of the northeast, so following normal procedures would have been a bad idea. You couldn't predict what this storm was going to do. Meteorologists were baffled by this storm as it was so atypical. The mother and daughter in the trailer sheltered by their father both survived, but the father was found the next day, dead. This tornado skinned cattle, skinned people caught in it, and some were ripped to pieces. The community has bounced back, though and now there are many storm shelters in place.
Thank you for info about the daughter of the mother that was found alive by the tree. I get that the video was about the storm itself, but it would have been nice if the narrator had included that detail considering he told the fate of the mother.
@@aura81295 It was in the video, right after the mother's fate. The video was paused mid-sentence so he didn't catch it, but it was said.
Man, you are hitting areas today that I have been or lived in. I had just moved to Texas February 1997 (about 35 miles south of Austin) My husband worked in North Austin at the time, said they could see it. This was an extremely frightening day, for me.
The following year, my area of Texas went through a 100 year flood, in my town. Oddly, it was October 17, 1998.
I was born and raised in Northern California, I will take an earthquake any day over a tornado. I was living just south of San Francisco (born and raised) October 17, 1989. I had two brother on the toll plaza of the Bay Bridge when it hit. It took the more than 8 hours to get home, they had to drive all the water around San Francisco Bay, all the bridges were shut down.
Mother Nature….crazy,
The wind from tornados can be so strong that there has been footage of a playing card logged into a tree and a piece of wood going through a concrete curb. Also, running away from a tornado in a car is a bad idea. Tornados can change directions, move faster than your car, or spawn multi vortexes or satellite tornados that can hit you. In the end, it's better to stay in an interior room/under ground, or if you're caught outside in a tornado, run into a ditch and lay down. If you have a car and are caught in a tornado you pull over into a ditch and either a get out the car and lay in the ditch or put the car in park leave it on and cover your face. In the end, trying to outrun a tornado when their is shelter nearby will usually be fatal they can move at highway speeds or faster.
This tornado is legit a once in a life time occurrence with how rare it is.
Ef5 - indescribably rare
South east travelling storms - this happens very very very rarely.
so everything about this whole event was just absurd and honestly a nightmare come true.
I live in Sweden and it’s way to cold to have a tornado happen but im extremely intrigued by this type of stuff.
You never try to outrun a tornado in a car, some tornadoes can reach up to 80mph in rare cases the current record is 96. Cars and become easily stuck, caught in traffic, and tossed. Your best option during a tornado is to go to your nearest shelter or basement. If neither are available you go into the most interior room in your house with no windows, and cover yourself with a mattress and blankets. The only time you try to run from a tornado is if your in a mobile home and you have no other options. Hiding in a hollow or deep creek bed is a far better option to driving.
According to the NWS “What makes a supercell unique from all other thunderstorm types is that it contains a deep and persistent rotating updraft called a mesocyclone. If the environment is favorable, supercell thunderstorms can last for several hours.” If you live in the area long enough you can sometimes feel, smell, or taste bad weather coming. In Nebraska I’ve witnessed it going from not a cloud in the sky to a strong thunderstorm in 5 minutes.
You did a better job explaining supercells than I did! 😮😊
@@dianefarley37 I cheated and googled the definition.
I lived nearby in North Austin and that tornado leveled the entire town down to the foundations of most buildings. New cheaper subdivisions are being built in Jarrell and I can't believe people would want to live in that area.
Here in NJ we don't get many tornados and they are small but they are still always scary as all hell. When the sky turns that particular shade of green (that's right, I said green), the leaves turn as the air changes, and your lizard brain starts sending anxiety signals through you.. it's always scary.
That animal instinct we couldn't domesticate out of ourselves 😂
An example of what a tornado can do with the debris it collects, it can impale straw into telephone poles.
Please check out the El Reno tornado from 2013 that was one that changed the rules and unfortunately claimed the lives of 3 storm chasers one chaser being the original dedicated to storms and safety. The super cell caught them off guard and had multiple vortexes and the chasers community had multiple storm chasers there waiting for it almost like a warning of what was to come
If you are picked up by a tornado you aren't carried away, you are torn to shreds.
A friend of mine lost everything in that tornado. She had been through other big tornadoes, but she said she had never experienced anything like this one. It was absolutely terrifying
Have friends who lived in Jarrell. Still do. What was unique was that there were concrete slabs that the tornado had sucked the copper water piping out of. Not just wiped everything from the top of the slab but where the pipe exited the slab it created enough suction to strip the copper totally out of the concrete.
"The dead man just walked into Jarrell......."
Gives me goosbumps every time.........
This was maybe one of the scariest things I remember from Ft Hood, we watched that storm run south, backwards, from our motor pool. I'm also a survivor of the 1970 Lubbock tornado which was one of the storms Dr Fujita used to make the Fujita Scale these were rated by.
Besides Xenia in '74, the Lubbock twister was the other one that Fujita had also initially rated as an F6.
I think the video said the daughter and mother in the bathtub miraculously survived but the father didn’t.
I lived in Jarrell at the time. I was at work and my sister in law called me and told me there was a tornado in Jarrell. My kids were there home from school and staying with the neighbor across the street from us. I immediately left work and headed the twenty miles north from my work place to home and halfway there, my gas pump went out. I had no choice but to sit in my car while the hail and driving rain pelted my truck. Once I got home, I found out the tornado was headed straight for our home, but lifted up less than a quarter mile away. My kids knew all the families of those who died as they went to school with the kids. Sad!
A lot of times, a car is not a safe place to be. Tornadoes can travel surprisingly fast, as fast if not faster than a car, especially in traffic or on windy, rural roads. And their paths are often unpredictable. They can stop, speed up, curve without any warning. For example, a tornado appears to be traveling parallel to the road you're on, so you decide to stop and watch it pass by. Before you know it, it has turned directions and begins barreling straight toward the road you're parked on, at 60 miles per hour. You don't have time to get back in your car and outrun it. You're done.
Oh, and just for reference, the fastest tornado recorded traveled across the ground at more than 90 miles per hour (145 km/h). Trying to outrun them is never advised, and it's better to seek shelter in a sturdy structure. That family was deeply unfortunate that the tornado randomly came to a standstill right over their home, and ripped it to shreds for several minutes. That is not a normal circumstance.
I live about an hour from Jarrell, and I remember this day vividly. My husband was on his way to work and narrowly missed being in another tornado that hit NW Austin that day. We were taught to take shelter in a sturdy building, in the basement or storm shelter, or in a windowless room in the center of the house, usually a bathroom or closet. We were told never to try to out run a tornado in our car. And if we were in our car, we are supposed to lie flat in a ditch. My extended family survived a violent 😊tornado in Wichita Falls, TX, in the late 1970s. Many of them chose to take their cars and leave. It's only been in the last 10 years that I've heard meteorologists telling people to leave their homes if they don't have an underground shelter when it's an especially violent tornado. I've lived in Texas for 30 years now. I've seen one small tornado, about 10 miles from my home, and several waterspouts (a tornado over water) and dust devils.
There's a big cedar tree up around Lake Travis that is still technically standing but was pretty much ripped in half by that Austin one.
The sanctuary building of my church in Houston, Texas was totally destroyed in a wind storm in 2003. It was made of brick, but not particularly well-constructed. All four walls were turned into rubble, the oak pews were splintered and the organ pipes were twisted and thrown around. The weather experts evaluated the storm and said it wasn't a tornado, just a storm cell. Luckily, no one was there, and the school building right next door, with children inside, was largely undamaged.
I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, I drive through Jarrell a lot on my way South to Austin. Every time I see the sign on I-35 for Jarrell I think about this. When we Texans hear the word “supercell,” we know it’s an extremely strong storm and we need to keep an eye on the weather. Because that’s the type of storm tornadoes come from. I hear watch and I’m like eh life as normal, just keep my phone on me. I hear warning and I’m looking at the radar to determine if I’m affected. I hear sirens, I’m heading into the tornado shelter. Mine is above ground though, but better than not having one. We are trained though not to be driving if there’s a tornado. They change direction too unpredictably. It’s better to be in the house sheltering than risk driving and getting caught in it. And remember, this tornado is 3/4 mile wide. The time it would take to know you’re in its path and gotta go, getting in the car, and being limited by where roads lead… you’re done. We don’t act unless we know it’s near us anyways. I’ve always been terrified of tornadoes and take them extremely seriously. My boyfriend on the other hand heard one was a mile from his house and went outside with pizza while it obliterated a restaurant and the parking lot at his job, with some damage to the building but minor. A friend of mine was at our amusement park (Six Flags) when a tornado headed for the park. Few people know where shelters in the park are. I do from having worked there and directed her where to go. Thankfully it didn’t hit the park. But yeah, that’s just our reality here.
If an F5 is coming, you either get underground, or you get in your vehicle and book it!
oh. another reason why cars are terrible to be in during a tornado is that tornadoes can travel at highway speeds and turn very erratically. that and they can just grow in size and suddenly overcome vehicles. now imagine a traffic jam because a news reporter told them to drive away. that already happened, another reason why driving during a tornado is so dangerous. people are sitting ducks waiting to get crushed like an empty soda can. ever look into the El Reno tornado? storm chasers that had decades of experience lost their lives because they were trying to actually get AWAY from that thing due to how it just kept growing in size and was moving very fast and erratic. and they were experts. now imagine a casual inexperienced family trying to get away from the tornado. yeah. driving away is not a good idea
Imo, El Reno is the best example of why you don't wanna be in a car during a tornado
@@characterblub2.0 fr. rip to the twistex team at that time. and again, they were professionals with radar, equipment, and decades of experience. so imagine a family with zero equipment, knowledge, and probably a car full of screaming kids with a mind clouded by panic. absolutely not
I use to work in the oil field in Colorado. In the summer, virtually everyday we’d get tornado warnings in the afternoon . One day we stopped in Limon Colorado for lunch. After lunch we headed to the next service call when we came up on some storm chasers along one of the dirt roads and stopped to talk to them when they asked where we were coming from and we told them Limon. We were asked what condition the town was in because a twister had headed that way. We said there was no issue there a half hour ago but we went back to see and the town was virtually gone. There was no sign whatsoever on the cafe we ate at an hour earlier.
"End up in Egypt" hilarious, You know?When the bad weather is coming, it has this eerie.Calm feeling and dark clouds.You don't know which way it's coming from but you know it's coming
The tornado that hit my hometown in 2011 first hit a roofing manufacturing facility then a scrap metal recycling center before passing straight through the middle of the city. The amount of debris that day was incredible.
You really should check out the Tuscaloosa Tornado of April 27th 2011.
again, as ppl have commented on previous reacts, cars are insanely bad to be in during a tornado and trying to get your entire family into one can take far too long. ever wanna know what one that's been hit looks like? crush a can. crumple it. and then put holes in it. yeahh they're not good to try to be in. especially since many tornadoes can travel at highway speeds. jarrell was an anomaly in that it kinda just stalled out at EF5 strength over the town. like imagine wind speeds of more than 200 mph just sitting over you for like 10 minutes. everything is ground down like it was sand-blasted due to the debris within the tornado
They don't know the tornado will hit their houses, the best forecasting is usually "It is likely going to hit or come near X town" and that is 5 minutes before it hits. They also don't know how fast it is moving, they can change size rapidly, they can change direction, etc. If everyone hopped in their cars and tried to drive out of town then they would just be stuck in traffic and while a tornado may not hit many homes it will certainly pass over some roads and a car is a lot less safe than a house, having traffic jams all around town would be way worse. It is also very hard to tell if a tornado is coming at you or not, in any footage of people with tornados coming right at them, it just looks like it isn't moving at all. Some also move much faster than cars, there are plenty of videos of people trying to out-drive them and just needing to give up and run into a house or hide under a bridge or in a ditch or whatever.
Like yes if they all knew this tornado was moving unnaturally slow and exactly what houses it would pass over and that it was about to grow 5x in size right before hitting their neighborhood then yes just the people who would be hit getting in cars and driving away would be ideal. In reality if there is anything they did wrong it was not knowing which two houses nearby had storm shelters, one of those storm shelters had 16 people in it so clearly many households knew they had one and to go there for tornados.
My grandmother had a small tornado in her area a few days ago. All the various cats she feeds suddenly decided they were *indoor* cats for a while, lol. No one got hurt (that I know of) but something kind of funny happened. One of their neighbors lost his garage, but the car IN the garage, was somehow fine. My dad says when he was a kid, they had a big tornado that took a farmers grain silo, picked it up, and set it down right way up on a *different* farm without spilling any of the grain.
Supercells sometimes contain things called Thunder Bumpers. You can tell if a cloud is a Thunder Bumper because it's super tall, reaching really high into the sky. One way to tell if a Supercell is going to produce a tornado, it will form a giant "wall" of clouds. Tornados can form in the corner.
Ps.. never run from a Tornado. You can not predict which way it's going to go... or how big it can get. Get you and your loved ones into a basement / storm cellar and ride it out there. If a storm the size of the F-5 at Jarrell... there's no place to run. No place to hide. Hunker down and pray. That's it.
I live in Northeast, Georgia USA. We've had a couple of tornadoes come very close to hitting our home, but none were over an EF3 level. I couldn't imagine living in Tornado Alley and having to deal with this on any given day..
There is a video taken during the huge Alabama tornado outbreak where a group of people took refuge in the walk in cooler at a Tuscaloosa gas station. Everyone survived but the video is terrifying. When they opened to door and walked out of the cooler the building was gone, along with most of the buildings nearby. I drove though one of the hardest hit areas near Birmingham several months later and it was heartbreaking. The good news is the warning systems and radar technology have really driven down the casualty rate.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that video is actually from the Joplin tornado, but the point still stands regardless. I can't imagine how terrifying it was to be in that cooler.
I was a mere mile away from the Tuscaloosa tornado sheltering with my friend on the University of Alabama campus. We had gone out to a few bars the night before on McFarland Blvd and when we came out after the tornado passed, the streets were unrecognizable. It literally looked like an atomic bomb had been detonated. I moved to Indiana two years later and I've been a basket case every time the mere possibility of tornadoes is mentioned in the weather reports. 🙃
"Dead man walking" was a Native American tale originally, since they're the ones who were first on the plains, it only makes sense they would have verbal history about tornados.
They did not leave because this was early days and they were told to shelter in place. This is why they have changed both building codes and what people are told to do in these situations. Get underground or out of the way.
Nope we are still told never get in your car.
@@alisonflaxman1566 look at news reports they at least say to get underground if you can and part of the problem in Moore? was that they had told people to go south and there were traffic jams. So in a house or in a car a house is better but it is situational awareness and that is harder to help people understand
@@Whateverhasbeenmynameforyears Not sure you understood what she said, but it’s a known fact even to this day that fleeing a tornado in a car is a dangerous thing to do. Jarrell was just an insanely rare exception. The families who lost their lives would have had to know ahead of time that the tornado was going as slow as it did, but of course it’s impossible to know that until after it happens.
@@WanderingRoethat was the situational awareness part. And they have tried to send people away and it is not better because congested roadways are the worst targets.
@@alisonflaxman1566 it is time that ppl stop listening to “the experts”. They’re usually incorrect. Just look at what happened with the Cov Cov shots.
I have been living in Tornado Alley (North Texas) since the 1970s and have only seen one tornado (1995), so that alone makes me feel thankful, but I have seen the aftermath of destruction that twisters cause while driving to nearby towns that were hit. Scary stuff!
As for you asking why they didn't drive away ... we're always told that we're safer to go to the innermost interior of a building/home, because tornados don't follow a straight and narrow path. For that reason, it's best to avoid being thrown around in the winds like a toy.
If a tornado is coming to you, all you can do is hunker down and hope. A tornado can easily pick up vehicles and show no mercy
People usually are safe in their homes, whereas in a car, you can easily be swept away. Those who begin to drive have no idea if the tornado is heading directly towards them at 75mph or not. Cars are not that strong, and tornadoes love throwing them hundreds of yards.
My grandmother was born in Jarrell and her grandfathers barn that she was born in was flattened in this tornado. A lot of black families lost a lot of legacy infrastructure. It was scary. I lived 10 mins away from this town for most of my life so it’s crazy seeing how much it’s grown from that to what it is now.
The Jarrell Texas Tornado aka "The Dead Man Walking". Wooo that twister when I first saw it on reports and first hand accounts send chills down my spine, like a literal folk story coming to life right before our eyes
Growing up, we were always taught that if a tornado is coming, you take shelter immediately. A car is the worst place you can be, so the best thing you can do is get to an inner room or underground. For a lot of tornados, even if there’s damage to the house, sheltering in place can save you.
With F5 tornados, though, they can just level everything. My family went to Joplin when I was a kid to deliver donated supplies, and it was so surreal and sad to see the landscape change from wooded areas and buildings to just flat, leveled nothingness all at once. I’ll never forget that. It was truly humbling
I'm a Texan, and one of the craziest things I've seen here was when I was about 12 years old in 1984 in Garland, Texas. I was outside, and spanning a range of about 60 degrees, I saw 5 tornadoes on the horizon all at once. Another crazy thing that happened when I was 9, a tornado went right by my house in Livingston, Texas. It didn't do much of anything to my house, but the houses right across the street were demolished.
"Scott, you need to get out, man." 😂😂😂
The most amazing thing to me was how it peeled the pavement off the road, leaving only the dirt. I have seen that in any tornado. My good friend sent me photos of the once streets. Unbelievable
I’ve never seen a tornado strip asphalt and I’ve personally experienced an EF5 here in AL. So wild
The family raced home to get in their Tornado shelter , was mentioned a few minutes back .
My family was in this tornado. I saw the dead man myself. Thankfuly my mom and grandpa were out of town, and I was on the otherside of the the town from where it hit. We were family friends of the Igos, and related to the Smiths, as well. No one knew how bad this storm was till it hit. Sometimes, the wind shear a mile out from the tornado makes driving dangerous, and the debris can circle around in the air up to 5 miles out from the storm. This is why, growing up, we are always taught to seek shelter in a basement, hallway closet with four walls, or a tub (in that order.) But in bad cases like this one, no one knew how bad it could grind up the houses where they were not safe. This one was special, too, because it was so slow and strong but also spun in a different direction than normal tornados. There were also the multiple spawned tornados previous to it reaching Jerrl, so we didn't think it would grow that bad, and it would at worst a EF3.
Why hide in a tub, may I ask? I’m from a country that basically doesn’t have tornadoes, we’ve had freak ones but they’re tiny and NOTHING like this.
If you notice the map when the first family is hit, the tornado is sitting on top of the road that would take them out of town. Also, because tornados are known to be unpredictable due to the chaotic winds circling, especially in a massive wedge tornado like this one, would toss the car like a toy.
THE SCARY PART
most tornados move at a steady fast pace. The family probably decided to Stand their ground because it would hit them but keep moving. This monster, pretty much stalled and eviscerated everything in its reach.
The thought of being on the middle of a F5 tornado that’s moving at such a slow pace is terrifying. You’re basically going to be like those fluffy yellow chicks that get swallowed by that grinder. (If you know that old video, then you know…. Those old school peta awareness emails.
I live about 50 miles from Jarrell. I know someone who was one of the first police to reach the site. They had to shoot a bunch of animals they found there that had no skin. There was a heap of dead humans in a ditch, not terribly recognizable. The pictures were chillingly horrible to me, because usually there is debris, and this time it was eerily clean; the houses were scraped off the earth, and so were parts of the roads. Those people that died went to the best shelter they could find, which was their homes. You can’t tell what direction a tornado will go next, so trying to outguess the direction to flee is hard. There was very little development out near Jarrell at that time, so no community storm shelters. They didn’t make dumb decisions, they just got terribly unlucky.
You are a Treat to watch! Thank you!!❤
Hey Adam! Greetings from America!! Thank you for all your reactions! I love them! ✌
8:35 I should add, during that time, the general advise to tornadoes was not that much understood and guidelines on what to do were not as comprehensive as it is today. People were advised to stay at home and hide in the most interior part of the house or the bathroom/tub during a tornado event. Also, unlike today where mobile devices have internet access and can see live updates on radar, they do not have those technologies back then, so going out of the tornado's way using a car and not knowing its path was a 50:50 gamble too. I get why the government at that time gave out the advise.
Also, the Jarell tornado was unique in its own way, going on a S-SW path that was unusual for most tornadoes in the US usually going N-NE.
10:48 Most of the time getting in a car and trying to drive out of the path of the tornado isn't a good idea, as you will not be able to get out of the way fast enough. And if you can, there is no guarantee you aren't in the path still. Also, tornadoes have proven to be unpredictable in their pathing and how wide the winds reach. A car could get thrown by the wind even if you are hundreds of feet from the tornado. A house is obviously a better cover. Houses built without storm shelters that close to where tornadoes happen is just dumb negligence to me. Build every home with an underground storm shelter.
I live just 8 miles south of where the Jarrell tornado hit. I didn't get direct tornado damage at my home but got lots of debris that was sucked 20,000-30,000ft up into the storm then dropped. Items as big as washing machines fell to the ground as far away as San Antonio, 100 miles to the south.
The reason why you are not advised to drive from a tornado is because everyone would do it, and then there would be traffic which would leave you a sitting duck in your car. The likely hood of dying from tornadoes while in a car is far higher than in your home.
8:30 back then, they'd never seen a slow moving tornado that was this powerful. Most strong tornadoes travel at highway speeds, so conventional wisdom stated that if there's a tornado to go home and ride it out and do not try to outrun the tornado in your car. This tornado flipped that whole concept on its head, as most of the families who sheltered in place above ground died and a family who outran the tornado in their car survived unscathed.
Not gonna lie, this one hit *actually* hard. 😖 The Jarrell tornado is the most terrifying one imo.
Thanks for keeping these tornado reactions coming, it’s a good day when we see an upload from you 👏
Man shielded his wife and daughter, gave his life for them, and because of that, they were the only 2 people above ground to have walked away from that alive. Man died like a hero, I can not imagine a better way to go out of this world than protecting the ones you love the most. Rest in peace.
The fact that this one sat in place and churned with 260 mile an hour winds wake up blender from hell for over 3 minutes over a residential neighborhood is mind blowing. Without being too graphic First Responders reported human bodies were reduced to the consistency of cat food
From as young as two or three years old in the U.S., we’re taught that a tornado siren means: 1.) a tornado is actively forming or visible; 2.) the safest place is as low as you can get; 3.) underground is best; 4.) but a room with no windows on the first floor will do in a pinch; 5.) and, barring that, if it has to be an exterior room with a window, the bathtub provides the most solid protection on 5 sides, even more so if you can pull a twin bed mattress in over yourself in it.
Seriously, I don’t know a single kid who wasn’t taught to prioritize their shelter options this way in the event of a tornado, and I don’t even live *near* Tornado Alley. I live in the Northeast region between NYC and Philly. And we still take tornado preparedness pretty seriously, even though most tornadoes that touch down here are F-0/F-1. They *can* be worse, though much more rare, so we’re still taught what to do to be as safe as we can.
And we’re constantly warned that a car is just a big fishbowl made of glass as far as safety is concerned. That glass will not do shit to protect you when the tornado suddenly changes direction without warning and the 2x4 it’s chucking around at 90 mph launches through your windshield like a frickin missile. We’re also taught not to shelter under bridges because tornado wind loves the wind tunnel effect bridges create and hiding under one is basically inviting a tornado to snatch you out from under it.
If you’re caught outdoors in a tornado, the best advice is supposedly still to get as low as you can in a ditch, if possible, tuck your head in, cover it and your neck with your arms to insulate yourself from scouring debris that could kill or paralyze you. (It would be nice if someone could do better than this for outdoor advice, ngl, because this is terrifying.)
Hi Adam, you might be interested in watching the video of John Force’s frightening crash that happened June 26, 2024. It was a serious explosion/crash. Mr. Force had already crossed the finish line at over 300MPH. John Force is a legend in the NHRA. He actually won the race before his engine exploded. Lots of prayers being sent up for Mr. Force to recover
Other than rain wrapped, another type of tornado that you can encounter is a night tornado since you cannot even see it. I live in San Antonio, Texas and was on my way back from Houston when I encountered a strong storm that had cars slow to a crawl. I had my phone on a holder on the dash and saw a tornado icon on the weather radar on my phone. I started to scan the sky in the direction that the icon was and saw the beginning of a tornado forming near the town of Sealy, Texas. This was in the middle of the night and the only way I could even see it was due to the lightning flashes of the storm. I literally had nowhere to go since the section of I-10 that I was on was under construction and there were barriers on either side of the 2 lane wide westbound section that I was on. Was one of the most terrifying tornado encounters I ever had. You never want to be caught in the open in a situation like that.
Living on the edge of tornado alley all my life, especially owning a home without a basement, I’ve always thought about getting a football helmet or motorcycle helmet, something like that to put in my closet where I always have my little emergency stuff in case of a bad storm. I’ve always felt a little silly about it, but damn, I think I will now!
I have watched many tornado videos, but this tornado is on a different level. I get chills watching videos about this one.
A tornado can pick up a full-size truck and add it to the debris circling the funnel. They can also suddenly accelerate to 70+ mph. A car is generally the last place you want to be. If everyone tries to drive away, you will be stuck in a traffic jam.
to make the British guys fear of tornadoes even worst is........
*Miku does Not talk to British people....*
I was born in Houston Texas and we had a bunch of them and hurricanes. You can’t really get in the car and drive because they can instantly switch directions and they’re fast man. It’s like a sit and pray thing. Also, many tornadoes don’t get a tornado warning before hand. If you do it’s usually just a few minutes and that’s if you see it. It’s almost impossible and if you do leave, you could hit it, if it switches. It’s not that easy to just leave brother. Scary stuff.
It’s also very hard to know where they’re moving unless you’re a professional. Many small towns in the country usually have one highway in and out. Yeah it’s hard to get away with little or no warning. At least with hurricanes we have days notice.
One Tornado hit across the street but missed our side. Moved to Atlanta 2 yrs ago and had 1 hit a mile away 2 months ago. Fun stuff
I live in tornado Alley...
" Why don't you just get in the car and leave?"...
Supercell storms are HUGE.. sometimes MILES wide and form in lines ... Sometimes hundreds of miles long. Tornados spun up in those storms are unpredictable. They can manifest anywhere in that storm.... Anywhere in the line of storms.... Can be there one second... dissipate and reform miles away... Formed tornadoes can "jump" too - on the ground, lift, and touch down hundreds of feet left or right, front or behind its current path.
So which way would you drive?.... Can you even drive fast enough with inches of rain falling in minutes... Hail... up to the size of cantaloupes hurling through the air by 100+ mph winds.
We had a F-1 pass within 1000 ft of my home yesterday... And didnt even lose leaves on our trees. Yet people 1/2 mile away lost everything. Thankfully no deaths or injuries.
Statistically it is safer to shelter in place... Get to the lowest point, basement/storm shelter if you have one, if not .. get away from doors/windows and put as many walls between you and the storm. Protect your head and neck and PRAY!
The level of destruction in this tornado is rare. It is much safer to be inside than outside or even in a car. Also, you don't know which roads are clear to drive or what direction the tornado is moving. Although there will always be risk if riding out a storm, these people weren't insane to shelter inside when there was no underground access. Sadly, this tornado not only came to visit but hung around for way too long.
It is said by first responders that between all the dead people, as well as the cattle from a nearby field, the entire area of destruction smelled like flesh and blood. Both people and cattle alike were skinned, mutilated, de-limbed, and in some cases reduced to nothing but bits and pieces. There were multiple cars that were never recovered, not even a single discernable piece, because they'd been entirely blended into shards. It killed 27 people but only injured 12, and that's because no one in the direct path or even close to the direct path survived that wasn't below ground. Truly hellish destruction.