Get Exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here → nordvpn.com/swegle It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌Use code swegle Thanks so much for watching! I wanted to try something new and do a tornado mini doc. I've seen a lot of other new TH-camrs do it so I wanted to try it out. ALSO it had been awhile since I released a tornado video.. Don't mind the different background. I'm working on a new (top secret) TH-cam channel.
Nord VPN would never have protected you from being hacked. Thats not how VPNS work at all. They are pretty much just for location changers. They do not protect you nor mitigate the issues. Please dont spread the misinformation they have been called out on. Just advertise it as a Location changer and or changing the IP destination.
Jarrel is genuinely a terrifying tornado… whenever I hear about it, it’s like I’m watching a documentary about a serial killer… how alive it seemed- how it absolutely left no trace of the subdivision aside from the cement foundation. And how the victims where unrecognizable, where they had to identify people by dental records. How it stayed almost stationary to *make sure* that there was no way to survive above ground. And how almost no was was injured, like it missed you- or it killed you. Absolutely terrifying, and I stand by the opinion that this was the most sinister tornado.
I know. I wish I could unread what I read about the victims. I’m so heartbroken for them and their families/friends. And the poor first responders too, traumatized for life.
I remember it vividly !! I live in Austin county ,, some 65 miles to the south and east!! Whenever I hear of it ,, like with this documentary,,chills immediately!!! And makes me thankful!!! God bless their souls !!!
Jarrell makes my skin crawl, even ignoring the dead man walking photo. It was a weird setup, not a high risk day you'd expect for an F5. And it went straight backwards. Sure, tornadoes wobble around, change direction, orbit the meso, etc, but Jarrell went *straight* backwards the whole time like the planet had turned upside down. Then it just stopped and parked itself over one neighborhood, pounding it to dust like it had a grudge. Your stomach just flips over when you see the damage - or the lack of damage, because there's just nothing there.
I live in south central Kansas. I've been here since '91. In all that time I've only ever seen a rogue mesoscale move backwards like Jarrell twice. It's really bizzare. Both times it happened when a cold front stalled in Oklahoma and then retreated north. I don't know if this was also the setup in Jarrell.
@@LuckyWolfUnleashed that actually was made up by the documentary that originated the phrase, there are no records of any native american legends of a dead man walking referring to tornados
I saw the craziest things a couple days after it had gone. What trees were still there, had a fur coat of blades of grass imbedded into the trunks and bigger branches that didn’t get ripped off. I saw gas lines just sticking up out of the ground, not immediately realizing they were from homes that used to be there. There was NOTHING left. The roads were lifted and blown away. Stock tanks were sucked dry. Everything was gone. There were no birds, no sounds of nature, just pure silence. The death of a town is the loudest quiet I’ve ever heard.
My friend's brother and his story that day was featured on the front page of the Austin American Statesman the day after it hit. He was at work when it started heading toward Jarrell. He drove back to his home where his wife, kids, a sister-in-law, her kids, etc. were fearfully waiting. He ran inside the house, looked out the back windows of his home, said he saw the tornado about 100 yards away. He commented in the article "It looked awesome." He knew instinctively they wouldn't live if they stayed. He and his family scrambled to their cars, drove away, and looked back down the street as they drove away to see the tornado hit, their home explode. Their only neighbors who lived were down in storm cellars. Only a handful survived. The entire neighborhood flattened. As you said, the foundations wiped clean.
The greatest part about this video was you mentioning the death of Billy Howard “Buddy” LaFrance, Jr. the man who sacrificed himself so his wife and 2 kids could stay safely in the bathtub. What an incredible story. RIP to Buddy and all those families who were involved. Great content as always.
I think it was just one daughter and his wife, but yeah. In the TLC documentary they even have the actor jokingly trash talking the tornado to calm down his family, no idea if that was just artistic license but it seemed right given his heroic actions. His daughter was interviewed in a retrospective a couple years ago. She has "hold on tight," his last words, tattooed on her arm.
Was my thinking exactly. My wife's name is Debbie and I definitely feel his pain. The name of a hardheaded woman. For God sakes Debbie shut up and listen!!
You know you’ve watched a lot of tornado videos that whenever you hear a guy calling a woman’s name with a tornado in frame, you automatically add ‘Get my pants!!’
If I'm not mistaken, the nature of the ground and soil the Jarrell Tornado sucked up before it hit the Double-Creek estates made it turn into a fine power that basically sand-blasted, for lack of a better term, everything in it's path. It turned everything it hit into a fine power, and as a result the bodies of the animals and people they did find were nothing but bones in some cases, making it hard to identify what they were at first.
@@Queenmarie88 did mention the metal recycling plant being the first building to be hit in the subdivision. I just heard another TH-camr (I think TornadoTRX) mention how hitting that building first added to the brutality
I have never read that the bodies were just 'bones' where did you get that from? The only thing I can think of is the mangled red lumps of flesh, which would've been confusing since their clothes would've definitely been sucked off.
My father witnessed this tornado's genesis. When he was driving north on I-35 near Prairie Dell/Salado area he saw motion out of the corner of his eye and looked out his driver side window. He described a disturbance in the field that organized into a whirl and then a thin pencil like tube grew upward out of it. He distinctly described it grew upwards more than downwards. It was rather beautiful to watch at first and he was mesmerized by it. Then he described another vortex spun up next to it - then another. He described how the original one in the center sort of thickened into a strong straight up and down and the two smaller ones sort of danced around the main one between them. He lost sight of it for a while as the terrain changed and then when he was able to get a look at again from behind me, he could see it was ballooning in size and consuming all before it. It absolutely frightened him in that moment, it felt to him like he only didn't see it for some moments and then the multi vortices were being obscured by a giant cone that formed around them. It was probably that moment he saw it when the "dead man walking" photo was snapped from a county road. When he got home to us he told us what he saw and I remember the breaking news reports that Jarrell had taken a direct hit by it and people were missing. The color just drained from my dad's face and he went to his room. The knowledge of what later happened was sickening to him. Many folks in the Williamson County sheriff's office needed years of therapy after responding to that day - trying to use various methods to identify what remains were cattle and what remains were human. Terrible day...
@@JosephFarrier-c8qqUiT cRyInG iT's JuSt WiNd DaMaGe I didn't know that disemboweled and limbless/headless bodies was "just" wind damage. Good to know!
Oh, I’ve been waiting for this one. All tornados are scary in some way, but the Jarrell F5 almost seems preternatural in how cruel it was to those communities.
@@Roryehatcher Very unusual I agree. The north to south motion and it just creeped me out that it was a ripe until it was right across the road from the south or creek estates and then decided to become an EF 5 for 7 minutes to massacre everyone and then once it left the neighborhood it just dissipated. Like, really. Come on!
Jarrell is insane for the DMW photo and the legend that it comes from. The one that scares me more, though, is the Greensburg EF-5. Not as high of a wind speed, but a mile plus wide EF-5 at midnight is downright nightmare fuel.
Greensburg was like 2 miles wide at it's widest point and the EF-5 that hit in 2007 was 1.7 miles wide(maybe I got the two switched up, but I remember the weather channel documentary talking about this) the twister hit the town head on and wiped out 95% of the homes and buildings. The 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri scared the hell outta me.
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The Jarrell tornado damage attributed to slow speed is highly misunderstood by many IMO. It's become clear most tornado damage is done almost immediately upon impact, as seen widely in footage of closeup violent tornadoes (Elie F5 throwing an entire house on contact for example). So most of the Jarrell tornado's damage was inflicted within seconds, the slow speed just allowed those intense vortices to reach every spot within the funnel, which to this day remains the widest swath of F5 damage ever recorded and dug a 2ft deep trench across a quarter mile. There have been slow moving and extremely violent tornadoes before, none of which caused damage anywhere near this level. Bridge Creek, often cited as "strongest tornado" was about a mile wide and moved at less than 30mph on average, so a direct hit meant that a structure was exposed to those winds for an entire minute or more, and the intensity of its damage still fell far short of Jarrell. Given that only a tiny fraction of tornadoes have been scanned by mobile doppler, and of those, we've seen several whose winds approached or exceeded 300mph, and never caused anything like the degree of destruction the one that hit Jarrell did, that leaves only one conclusion. Imagine, had this thing been moving at 60mph, it would have +60 added to its forward flank windspeed giving it even more intense power, and a direct hit would still last 45-ish seconds within that funnel. This tornado was the most intense that has ever been documented, and since no measurements of its winds were ever taken we will never know just how fast the wind speeds were, but based on available evidence it seems clear it had to be WELL over 300mph, most likely this is the upper echelon of tornado power. Excellent video of this unique monster, btw!
@@SamoStudios if anything, it’s likely harder for the slow movers to reach such a level of violence. In highly sheared environments, fast moving right-turners produce violent tornadoes very quickly. Most recent reminder? Rolling fork. However, these slow movers don’t have that surge of inflow violently bulldozing its way into the forward flank the way fast moving storms in extremely high shear environments do. Forward motion is so misunderstood like you stated. Slow movement can cause a tornado to sit over an area longer, exposing a structure to winds longer yes, but fast forward motion intensifies the tornado itself. These slow movers have to self sustain themselves to reach this level of intensity
@@dannyllerenatv8635 Exactly, and to think the environment wasn't even primed for such a monster in the first place. The theory that gravity waves from a collapsing storm may have somehow supercharged this tornado is interesting.
@@SamoStudios100%. I agree with every word you said and was almost typing all this myself since I always read so much BS about the Jarrell tornado...great job man, I hope more people will read it and learn something.
@@MeesterJ Thanks, I see this a lot in videos (among other inaccuracies like "x tornado had (insert number) windspeed" even though it was never measured. I just want to make sure people learning about these tornadoes for the first time understand these points.
Very glad to read this. I always hear about people saying smithville as the maybe strongest ever, because it had 70mph forward speed so it didn’t have much time to do damage. While that is true to a certain degree, if you took the rotational speed completely out of the picture, that’s still a massive wall of air, moisture, and degree, slamming into you at highway speeds. That alone would be enough to cause some very serious damage. So when you add in 300mph rotation with that, it becomes unimaginable. Which is why a lot of those 2011 tornadoes were so bad, because they all had very high ground speeds. That being said, I think there’s probably a balance between when something moving so slow that it sits on top of you for minutes on end, being better than it being a bit stronger and moving faster. I’d love to see some simulations comparing the same conditions for a tornado with one moving slow, versus fast; otherwise it being the exact same, and seeing the difference in damages. I would believe in some cases it would be better, or worse, given a certain set of circumstances
I remember this storm from when I was in kindergarten. We lived about 20 miles from Jerrell at the time, and had to take shelter during the same storm. Though no tornados hit our neighborhood, I remember hiding in the closet under the stairs with my mom and the family pets. We had only moved to Texas a few months before the storm from the Colorado Front Range and had no idea what to do in a tornado warning, so we put on bike helmets and filled the closet with couch cushions. I remember emerging from the closet hours later when my dad got home from work, and we spent the evening in a daze like we had just survived a war. Watching the devastation in Jerrell on the news that night was unnerving, knowing how close we were to that being us. My mom resolved to leave Texas after that storm, and we returned to Colorado before the end of the year. We've dealt with wildfires and blizzards since then, but I'll take them over tornadoes in a heartbeat.
This is in terms of geography, the closest F5 tornado to my hometown. My mom has a friend who was good friends with the Igo family that were killed in this storm. This was not a good day for Central Texas as a whole.
The Jerrel, Texas tornado was truly a terrifying vortex and the infamous Dead Man Walking footage never ceases to send chills down my spine when the vortex was transitioning from a rope to a large wedge combined with its slow forward moving speed of 5-10 miles an hour, it's almost like the twister was alive.
Tornadoes are finally a recognized weather phenomenon in my country, a bunch of villages got wrecked by tornados, Denmark of all places. They called me nuts but I just looked up frequently enough. "Damaging land going water spouts" have been recognized in the past. This is absolutely crazy though, rope tornados can be seriously unpredictable
Finnish counterpoint: it's not that they don't occur at all, they are just less frequent in Europe (since the circumstances that create them are less likely to occur than they are in the US), and at least in Finland it's called trombi, not tornado, if it's on the news since that's the more European word for it. So stuff like that may confuse a "lay person" who thinks of tornadoes as something that happens in American cartoons. But I'm pretty sure you don't live in the dark ages over there and the meteorologists know that a tornado can indeed occur anywhere. I guess maybe your friends or acquaintances might have found the thought strange, though, since in the end they are really rare as far as weather phenomena goes.
@@MiroDaisuke They actually have gotten steadily more common since around 2019, they tear up forests and throw around trampolines, they also happen a bunch in the UK but they are rarely reported on.
@@samtron5000 the Meteorological Institute of Denmark refused to acknowledge tornados as a phenomenon that can occur around here. This was quite weird, especially considering that there is a historically documented tornado related disaster in the town of Holstebro back in the 60's, in which an F2-F3 caused severe damage. Smelled a bit like insurance company disaster denialism. Now every single journo around here cites ESWD and eye witness sources, video footage, etc, and the institute now recognizes tornados in the rotten old state of Denmark.
@@homeopathicfossil-fuels4789 This is really fascinating! I currently study a MA in History at Aarhus university and I am actually really interested in this - I've been trying to find ways to bring the weather into my field. 👀
I live in Temple TX which is about 15 minutes north of Jarrell. Anyway I watched a news channel doing the 25 year anniversary and a guy who helped recover bodies said this “After the tornado, we didn’t find bodies, we found people in pieces” he said they were literally shredded into parts 🤮
Yes, I grew up, and still live, in the DFW metroplex but we had just moved out of Williamson county that same month, after spending 2 years in Austin. I was 8 when this Tornado hit Jarrell and watching that news piece and listening to that man say that about recovering body parts brought up those same feelings I had as a kid seeing pictures of the livestock that died in Double Creek Estates. I’m thankful I didn’t know anyone had died there until I was much older. Nightmare fuel. 😰
@ I don’t know. Think about the spinning and the pressure. Think about the wind spinning at 200 plus mph. That’s enough to shred anything. That’s what happens to tree barks. And if they’re strong enough I’ve seen photos where F5 tornadoes have stripped Asphalt from the street.
@ Well that can also be true But For You or anyone simply Say “Oh No it’s Not the wind! It’s what’s in The Tornado” that’s just straight up Asinine and Ridiculous
I grew up in Waco. Ill never forget that day. I had just finished 7th grade. My mother and I raced home to take shelter when the sirens went off. Fortunately the storm was to our south so it wasn't a danger for us. I watched the news coverage all day and into the night as the aftermath was being covered. Ill never forget it. It made such an impact on me.
This tornado literally goes. Hey, I’m gonna go through freaking METAL RECYCLING facility, grab a whole bunch of shrapnel, steer right into a couple of houses and then sit on top of the rest.. then just go to the woods and vanish…. Like wth.. it’s always baffled me… like evil incarnate or something
@@Firemarioflowerthe search and rescue had a hard time trying to identify the remains of the people from the remains of livestock. No one deserved this terrible thing.
I live in Jarrell and read about the tornado. Reading and researching didn't prepare me to look at how close the site was to where I live now. Terrifying but really good to see. Wonder if the town still has sirens now..
@@skrounst Yea, especially with the rapid growth in the entire I35 corridor from north Austin up to Jarrell. With the number of new subdivisions a similar storm would be far more devastating. Interestingly enough the house I lived in would have been in the path of the tornado that hit the grocery store in Cedar Park on that same day. It was built years later, but when I put the damage path of the tornadoes that day on the map it was square in the center of that particular tornado.
@samanthasims9392 i learned this after moving here. Now I hope my emergency alerts work on my phone! I'm still fresh to the area so thank you for confirming what I was able to find so far.
To me the scariest part of this is that so many of those who died were doing what they were supposed to do: sheltering in an interior room. Many of them even came home early, thinking they would be safer at home. This sort of thing is why, if I ever move back to a tornado-prone region, I will not have a house without a basement, and even then, I plan to save up for a shelter.
The family that had a tornado shelter within the Double Creek estate who survived along with their neighbors inside of it had only built it because they survived a previous tornado.
I lived 15 miles from Jarrell and I remember how scary this day was. The tornado sirens went off multiple times. My whole family was shocked and saddened when we found out the extent of the Jarrell F5.
I lived in Killeen for two years, which is about 20 minutes north of Jarrell, so was able to go see the memorial site. I’ve been to the Twistex memorial in El Reno and also the Plaza Towers Elementary Memorial in Moore and Jarrell is without a doubt the most chilling. It really changes your perspective being there. Like I get caught up in the statistics and shock of all the record breaking tornadoes and tend to lose appreciation for the human factor, but that shit will humble you quick. I was gonna say it seems like an odd choice to cover this since it’s been done so extensively the past few years (even by you with the dead man walking lore), but I still enjoyed this. Not a lot of people talk about that gap of time between what is seemingly two tornadoes, and also I don’t think many people have shown Google earth pics either. Nice job.
I have always been so sad that there is no footage of the actual moment the tornado went from rope-like to wedge. I want to think it was the same Tornado, as they just makes this tornado all the more mysterious and intriguing. The 'Jarrel Dead-Man Walking F5' Tornado will always be one of my "favorite" tornados of all time. Ty for this awesome vid! (i always get so excited for new vids about this tornado even tho I have seen EVERY bit of footage/pics/ect that is currently known of this tornado---i never get tired of seeing it again and again!
Swegle, I feel like I’ve watched dozens of videos on this tornado and have learned everything there is to learn about it-but you managed to bring a whole new perspective. You shared so much footage and info that I’ve never seen before. Your TH-cam channel is absolutely outstanding, you deserve all the flowers!!
0:42 I saw you sneak in the GOAT James Spann yet again. Part of the reason I love your videos! Also the monster F5 started out as a tiiiny lil fella. Its amazing how it can go from. Oooo a tornado to a holy hell we are all gonna die tornado
I made the drive from San Antonio to Dallas, TX today. I have lived in both Austin, Dallas, & SATX before, so I have driven this route many times, and every time I run through Jarrell I think of what happened 27 years ago. I actually stopped at the Bell County Northbound rest stop that you mentioned at 10:09 just earlier today. Neat & interesting timing to see this posted, I love your content and thanks. Touching video
I was probably 7 or 8 when this happened. I lived just on the outskirts of Jarrel and I was so fascinated by the weather change even as a kid despite it being so scary at the same time. I remember taking shelter in an HEB bread aisle as the sirens went off. But I still think this event made me more excited about storms than sunny weather ever since then, it definitely left an impression on me.
The retro aesthetic you use is therapeutic for me. So many core memories for a guy born in '95 right before everything went digital. Love it! Not to mention the 10/10 actual content. KEEP IT COMIN!
Awesome video! Also, I love how you got a repeat of the Weather Channels local forecast on a Commodore 1702. A mix of 80s/90's nostalgia there. I love it!
As someone who watched it from there backyard.. it was the same one. I will forever have that moment etched in my mind. The feel of the world just standing still for a moment and then you just saw it. I never want to see in person a tornado again
We can’t conclude that tornado alley is shifting based off of a decade or two worth of mega outbreaks. That’s why meteorologists call the south Dixie alley and the traditional alley tornado alley. There hasn’t been enough time to determine whether this is just a fluke or a new trend. However, Kansas and Oklahoma are still top for violent and long lived EF 5 tornadoes.
@@JustinLHopkins The fact that the NWS effectively stopped handing out EF5 ratings doesn't help either. Several storms that could really start to shift the numbers eastward have all been given EF4 for some dubious reasons.
17:23 Fun fact about the igos: They were the family that contributed the most to the community, and as an honor, they had their own elementary school built
I would love to see more of these documentaries from you. You have a knack for storytelling and you seem show a lot more actual footage than some of the other weather doc channels
15:00 I've always felt that this tornado, more than any other, is indicative of an extremely efficient machine whose job was simple; grind everything in its path into a fine powder that it was to disperse, which it did.
I survived the Cedar Park tornado with my family from the same system as it hopped over our house while we were in a central closet. There were cracks along the foundation from the tornado trying to pick up the house. The scenes from Jarrell are seared into my memory forever. We were so fortunate. I had no idea until recently, coming across your videos that the Jarrell tornado was so infamous among tornado enthusiasts. Keep up the amazing work, dude. Your videos are fantastic and exceptionally well made.
The totality of the damage is because of the slow crawl it did over the landscape. The winds themselves were not even close to record-setting. Bridge-Creek 1999, Smithville 2011 and El Reno 2013 were all MUCH more powerful.
08:44 This is a very strong, narrow, rope-shaped deposition “engine” driven tornado (depo). This depo is exhibiting, uncommon, but not rare, vertical suction. As such it’s feeding condensation nuclei (CCN) into the lower levels of storm’s/cloud’s core/mesocyclone (meso). 11:44 Rich with CCN, the meso began to condense more water vapor (H2Og) in its lower and warmer levels. The depo, starved of H2Og, was choked off. A new hybrid deposition and condensation “engine” formed in a zone of the meso between its extremely cold heights and warmer bottom. This produced the transitionary stovepipe-shaped tornado. 14:16 So much condensation is happening in the meso’s warner bottom levels that it’s hybrid “engine” is being replaced by a condensation driven “engine.” As such, the tornado is becoming more wedge-shaped. 14:46 Now a full on wedge-shaped condensation driven tornado (conden). Notice its strong vertical suction, a common trait of condens. This suction magnifies the effects of the tornado’s winds. 14:29 Beckwith’s photos capture this storm’s meso’s multiple tornado transformations so well.
i love this new kind of video covering specific crazy weather events! please make it a series!! you perfectly infuse the facts & history with your charisma & it makes learning about something that usually requires a watching a documentary or two sanitized of personality. from one weather enthusiast to another, your excitement about these phenomena is palpable & your way of bringing up “conspiracies” as a punchline keeps it grounded. ill wait for my bell to ring! keep up the awesome work
Hey Swegle, could you review the 3-3-19 Beauregard Tornado? It is very unheard of, but it was a wedge that was filmed around many locations and had over 30+ deaths!
Hearing the stories of those lost always saddens me. When seeing a photo of the entire family lost, it's a sucker punch for sure. When Googled, I discovered the Igos, Smith, and Moehring families are buried in the same cemetery. The cemetery even widened the plots so that each family could be together as one family. 😢
The Jarrell F5 is the most amazing tornado. I thought I’d learned about it from your channel - guess not. 😳 Excellent video, good remembrance of the perished.
Jarrell has haunted ne for years, such an intriguing tornado. Terrible for the poor souls caught in its path-hard to imagine a more terrifying spot to be in. Great video and channel....
Thank you for pointing out why this part of Texas doesn't have basements! Our soil is very heavy clay. When it's dry, it shrinks and becomes very hard. This makes for flash foods AND shifting foundations. We literally "water our foundations" here to try to reduce foundation shifting and cracking. All homes will eventually develop drywall cracks. So, imagine trying to build a basement. It'll crack, shift, and flood after a couple of years. And then put a house on that big ol' hole? Nope. No basements here.
I was 10 years old and lived in Georgetown, a town just south of Jarrell when it happened. I will never forget that day. It sounded like a train and the sky got so dark and had such a weird feel to the atmosphere. It seemed almost like a green color. We drove by the Albertsons afterward and the devastation was shocking. I heard the people inside survived by taking shelter inside the store's freezer.
Another great documentary about this fascinatinng tornado! Would love a video about the 1990 Plainfield F5. Being my hometown, your videos have inspired my to look for remnants and I have thought about digging deeper to find any information about the tornado from local sources. I would love to share anything I find.
VERY unusual for an EF5 to move to the southwest. Another EF5 was the Rocksprings, TX tornado of April 12, 1927 which killed 72 ( 2nd highest in Texas history). It moved southeast for 60 miles. The atmospheric setup may have been similar that day.
As someone (a DFW resident) who has been to Waco and everywhere in between for football games at my school this is criminally insane how these big ass tornadoes hit our state. I remember that my town Cleburne had a terrible F3 back in 2013, it was actually so crazy even my old school had a giant metal capsule crashed into the second floor. I remember my mom taught a guy whose house was ripped apart by that tornado, he is now a school teacher and his story was on the news. Several residents in Grandbury were even killed in that same F3 I think. This was a year right before I moved to Cleburne, however my hometown Fort Worth has seen far worse in its time.
Man, I watch these old tornado videos, and it brings me chills. Then I see the traffic on the roads and it makes me want to go back in time just for the vehicles.
I’m fascinated yet terrified of tornados. My wife was stationed at Fort Hood last year so we moved to Killeen, TX. It was only after we were settled in that I realized how close Jarrell was to there 😩😂 doesn’t help my tornado anxiety
I lived through this. We lived in Theon, TX just across the interstate. I went to school in Jarrell. Not sure why it popped into my feed but these are memories I have tried to forget. The video and photos can't truly describe what this day was like.
I think another reason people are so fascinated with this tornado is the damage it inflicted on the victims. People have always been interested in the gruesome nature of death and this one produced some of the more disturbing deaths relating to a tornado, which makes it extra terrifying.
@@Golden_retriever_frien It would've been even worse than Moore or El Reno. Because it would've moved at 5 mph or slower, doing even more damage than those other two ever did...
@@TheSkyGuy77 yeah but still both of those towns are close to Oklahoma City and Oklahoma City is a very largely populated area that’s notorious for getting tornadoes. If this tornado specifically hit one of those towns it would cause a min damage to Oklahoma City and who knows what would happen to some people who lived in Oklahoma City near Moore or El Reno
Great video as always, Jake - digging the new opening credits, not so sure about the new set, loved the dark feel of the old one. As always, incredibly done, well researched, and highly informative as well as entertaining - keep it up!
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Thanks so much for watching! I wanted to try something new and do a tornado mini doc. I've seen a lot of other new TH-camrs do it so I wanted to try it out. ALSO it had been awhile since I released a tornado video.. Don't mind the different background. I'm working on a new (top secret) TH-cam channel.
Yooo, huge fan of your channel man. Top quality video.
Does anyone know where the corner photos are?
Bro I got first like on this lol
Nord VPN would never have protected you from being hacked. Thats not how VPNS work at all. They are pretty much just for location changers. They do not protect you nor mitigate the issues. Please dont spread the misinformation they have been called out on. Just advertise it as a Location changer and or changing the IP destination.
Is there any way I could email you some pictures of some interesting clouds and cloud formations?
Jarrel is genuinely a terrifying tornado… whenever I hear about it, it’s like I’m watching a documentary about a serial killer… how alive it seemed- how it absolutely left no trace of the subdivision aside from the cement foundation. And how the victims where unrecognizable, where they had to identify people by dental records.
How it stayed almost stationary to *make sure* that there was no way to survive above ground.
And how almost no was was injured, like it missed you- or it killed you.
Absolutely terrifying, and I stand by the opinion that this was the most sinister tornado.
I know. I wish I could unread what I read about the victims. I’m so heartbroken for them and their families/friends. And the poor first responders too, traumatized for life.
The closest thing to an actual monster
I remember it vividly !! I live in Austin county ,, some 65 miles to the south and east!! Whenever I hear of it ,, like with this documentary,,chills immediately!!! And makes me thankful!!! God bless their souls !!!
Sadly, most victims were in pieces. Not even chunks, just pieces.
According to damage data, this tornado was the most powerful tornado.
Jarrell makes my skin crawl, even ignoring the dead man walking photo. It was a weird setup, not a high risk day you'd expect for an F5. And it went straight backwards. Sure, tornadoes wobble around, change direction, orbit the meso, etc, but Jarrell went *straight* backwards the whole time like the planet had turned upside down. Then it just stopped and parked itself over one neighborhood, pounding it to dust like it had a grudge. Your stomach just flips over when you see the damage - or the lack of damage, because there's just nothing there.
I live in south central Kansas. I've been here since '91. In all that time I've only ever seen a rogue mesoscale move backwards like Jarrell twice. It's really bizzare. Both times it happened when a cold front stalled in Oklahoma and then retreated north. I don't know if this was also the setup in Jarrell.
That dead man walking photo isn't even scary.
@@carlitosdinkler5213 The lore is though. A Native American legend states “If you see the dead man walking, and he does not move, you will die”
@@LuckyWolfUnleashed that actually was made up by the documentary that originated the phrase, there are no records of any native american legends of a dead man walking referring to tornados
@@carlitosdinkler5213 if you dont know much about tornadoes, sure.
I saw the craziest things a couple days after it had gone. What trees were still there, had a fur coat of blades of grass imbedded into the trunks and bigger branches that didn’t get ripped off. I saw gas lines just sticking up out of the ground, not immediately realizing they were from homes that used to be there. There was NOTHING left. The roads were lifted and blown away. Stock tanks were sucked dry. Everything was gone. There were no birds, no sounds of nature, just pure silence. The death of a town is the loudest quiet I’ve ever heard.
Jesus.
My friend's brother and his story that day was featured on the front page of the Austin American Statesman the day after it hit. He was at work when it started heading toward Jarrell. He drove back to his home where his wife, kids, a sister-in-law, her kids, etc. were fearfully waiting. He ran inside the house, looked out the back windows of his home, said he saw the tornado about 100 yards away. He commented in the article "It looked awesome." He knew instinctively they wouldn't live if they stayed. He and his family scrambled to their cars, drove away, and looked back down the street as they drove away to see the tornado hit, their home explode. Their only neighbors who lived were down in storm cellars. Only a handful survived. The entire neighborhood flattened. As you said, the foundations wiped clean.
It's seems like pure wipe out from face of the Earth. Most brutal tornado damage i ever seen on video.
The greatest part about this video was you mentioning the death of Billy Howard “Buddy” LaFrance, Jr. the man who sacrificed himself so his wife and 2 kids could stay safely in the bathtub. What an incredible story. RIP to Buddy and all those families who were involved. Great content as always.
I didn't even know that rip Billy Howard 🕊️
I hope that man got a nice place in the afterlife for his act. Man deserves the title of hero.
Poor guy, and his family. Horrible thing to go through.
I think it was just one daughter and his wife, but yeah. In the TLC documentary they even have the actor jokingly trash talking the tornado to calm down his family, no idea if that was just artistic license but it seemed right given his heroic actions.
His daughter was interviewed in a retrospective a couple years ago. She has "hold on tight," his last words, tattooed on her arm.
@@BradLackeYeah, just one of the daughters was there, but they had more child/children that were already out of the house.
5:33 DEBBIE for gods sake, answer the man!
Hahaha. I actually lol’ed reading this
Debbie pls
Was my thinking exactly. My wife's name is Debbie and I definitely feel his pain. The name of a hardheaded woman. For God sakes Debbie shut up and listen!!
You know you’ve watched a lot of tornado videos that whenever you hear a guy calling a woman’s name with a tornado in frame, you automatically add ‘Get my pants!!’
@@haysgoodman8068 Haha good to know it's not just me who did this
If I'm not mistaken, the nature of the ground and soil the Jarrell Tornado sucked up before it hit the Double-Creek estates made it turn into a fine power that basically sand-blasted, for lack of a better term, everything in it's path. It turned everything it hit into a fine power, and as a result the bodies of the animals and people they did find were nothing but bones in some cases, making it hard to identify what they were at first.
i thought it did this because it hit the metal recycling plant at first, so it was bits of metal flying around sand blasting everything
@@holdmyseatbelt1184hmmm I never thought about that--I wish Swegle would talk about this. Interesting.
@@Queenmarie88 did mention the metal recycling plant being the first building to be hit in the subdivision. I just heard another TH-camr (I think TornadoTRX) mention how hitting that building first added to the brutality
I have never read that the bodies were just 'bones' where did you get that from? The only thing I can think of is the mangled red lumps of flesh, which would've been confusing since their clothes would've definitely been sucked off.
Yeah lots of limestone I think I've read? That's also why there weren't any basements, because that type of soil is really hard to dig and build in
My father witnessed this tornado's genesis. When he was driving north on I-35 near Prairie Dell/Salado area he saw motion out of the corner of his eye and looked out his driver side window. He described a disturbance in the field that organized into a whirl and then a thin pencil like tube grew upward out of it. He distinctly described it grew upwards more than downwards. It was rather beautiful to watch at first and he was mesmerized by it. Then he described another vortex spun up next to it - then another. He described how the original one in the center sort of thickened into a strong straight up and down and the two smaller ones sort of danced around the main one between them. He lost sight of it for a while as the terrain changed and then when he was able to get a look at again from behind me, he could see it was ballooning in size and consuming all before it. It absolutely frightened him in that moment, it felt to him like he only didn't see it for some moments and then the multi vortices were being obscured by a giant cone that formed around them. It was probably that moment he saw it when the "dead man walking" photo was snapped from a county road. When he got home to us he told us what he saw and I remember the breaking news reports that Jarrell had taken a direct hit by it and people were missing. The color just drained from my dad's face and he went to his room. The knowledge of what later happened was sickening to him. Many folks in the Williamson County sheriff's office needed years of therapy after responding to that day - trying to use various methods to identify what remains were cattle and what remains were human. Terrible day...
It's OK you got a gay femm daddy it's 😅all good kid
Quit crying it's just wind damage
@@JosephFarrier-c8q shut up 🫶🏻
@@JosephFarrier-c8qqUiT cRyInG iT's JuSt WiNd DaMaGe
I didn't know that disemboweled and limbless/headless bodies was "just" wind damage. Good to know!
Oh, I’ve been waiting for this one. All tornados are scary in some way, but the Jarrell F5 almost seems preternatural in how cruel it was to those communities.
Tornadoes like Jarrell remind us that nature is still in charge and that we’re only temporary visitors on this planet.
I am grateful convective chronicles explained how it happened because I was half convinced someone got smited or hexed. It was very unusual
@@Roryehatcher Very unusual I agree. The north to south motion and it just creeped me out that it was a ripe until it was right across the road from the south or creek estates and then decided to become an EF 5 for 7 minutes to massacre everyone and then once it left the neighborhood it just dissipated. Like, really. Come on!
9ixvp,lc;? n x G kx B pfuduadgp00l 90s@@Roryehatcher
Jarrell is insane for the DMW photo and the legend that it comes from. The one that scares me more, though, is the Greensburg EF-5. Not as high of a wind speed, but a mile plus wide EF-5 at midnight is downright nightmare fuel.
You be surprised there was a f5 tornado that ACTUALLY struck at midnight in Wisconsin
Greensburg was like 2 miles wide at it's widest point and the EF-5 that hit in 2007 was 1.7 miles wide(maybe I got the two switched up, but I remember the weather channel documentary talking about this) the twister hit the town head on and wiped out 95% of the homes and buildings.
The 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri scared the hell outta me.
@ritchietodd409 dude nothing will compete against Jarrell the thing wipe a subdivision and stalled for 3 minutes
17:32 I don’t know why, but this was so creepy to me. to think a family once made memories on that very foundation, which now people just hang out at.
Dude I was just about to comment this. Just insanely bizarre. The history would make me feel unsettled to even sit there knowing the awful past.
There’s definitely some paranormal activity that goes on there
It was the victims families that erected that in their honor
I live in jarrell, just moved here a year ago. everyone who was here in 1997 knew someone who died it really affected this place
Not surprising, as the town had a population of roughly 450 people at the time of the disaster. Lots of people packed up and never looked back.
If you dont mind me asking, what brought ya to that neck of the woods?
I was there I knew a waitress that worked in Georgetown that didn't make it.
Its crazy there hasn't been an Ef5 in more then 10 years
Lets change that
I know... Even tornadoes like Rolling Fork, Vilonia, Mayfield, Greenfield, and Fairdale deserve such a high rating.
I think the 2021 Kentucky and 2024 Iowa tornadoes should’ve been EF5s
@@MekaylaTheChimera yeah, those shouldve been ef5.
@@jonjonsshreds3312 I agree alot
Swegle posts a video, and I IMMEDIATELY watch it.
SOME ONE GET DEBBY SHE IS MISSING THE TURNADO
SOME ONE GET DEBBY SHE IS MISSING THE TURNADO
@@commiecomrade2644DAM BARB OVER HEAR AINT WANTIN TO WATCH SWEGLE ! SHE BUSY COOKIN DINNER ! DEBBIE SHULD HUVE LISTENED TO GARY WHILE FILMING TEH NADER !! LOTS OF CLIBBINS TO WATCH OUT FOR HOSS ! GOBLESS !
SOME ONE GET DEBBY SHE IS MISSING THE TUUUURRRRNADDDOOO!
No way like immediately ??? AMAZING !!!!!!
The Jarrell tornado damage attributed to slow speed is highly misunderstood by many IMO. It's become clear most tornado damage is done almost immediately upon impact, as seen widely in footage of closeup violent tornadoes (Elie F5 throwing an entire house on contact for example). So most of the Jarrell tornado's damage was inflicted within seconds, the slow speed just allowed those intense vortices to reach every spot within the funnel, which to this day remains the widest swath of F5 damage ever recorded and dug a 2ft deep trench across a quarter mile.
There have been slow moving and extremely violent tornadoes before, none of which caused damage anywhere near this level. Bridge Creek, often cited as "strongest tornado" was about a mile wide and moved at less than 30mph on average, so a direct hit meant that a structure was exposed to those winds for an entire minute or more, and the intensity of its damage still fell far short of Jarrell. Given that only a tiny fraction of tornadoes have been scanned by mobile doppler, and of those, we've seen several whose winds approached or exceeded 300mph, and never caused anything like the degree of destruction the one that hit Jarrell did, that leaves only one conclusion.
Imagine, had this thing been moving at 60mph, it would have +60 added to its forward flank windspeed giving it even more intense power, and a direct hit would still last 45-ish seconds within that funnel. This tornado was the most intense that has ever been documented, and since no measurements of its winds were ever taken we will never know just how fast the wind speeds were, but based on available evidence it seems clear it had to be WELL over 300mph, most likely this is the upper echelon of tornado power.
Excellent video of this unique monster, btw!
@@SamoStudios if anything, it’s likely harder for the slow movers to reach such a level of violence. In highly sheared environments, fast moving right-turners produce violent tornadoes very quickly. Most recent reminder? Rolling fork. However, these slow movers don’t have that surge of inflow violently bulldozing its way into the forward flank the way fast moving storms in extremely high shear environments do. Forward motion is so misunderstood like you stated. Slow movement can cause a tornado to sit over an area longer, exposing a structure to winds longer yes, but fast forward motion intensifies the tornado itself. These slow movers have to self sustain themselves to reach this level of intensity
@@dannyllerenatv8635 Exactly, and to think the environment wasn't even primed for such a monster in the first place. The theory that gravity waves from a collapsing storm may have somehow supercharged this tornado is interesting.
@@SamoStudios100%. I agree with every word you said and was almost typing all this myself since I always read so much BS about the Jarrell tornado...great job man, I hope more people will read it and learn something.
@@MeesterJ Thanks, I see this a lot in videos (among other inaccuracies like "x tornado had (insert number) windspeed" even though it was never measured. I just want to make sure people learning about these tornadoes for the first time understand these points.
Very glad to read this. I always hear about people saying smithville as the maybe strongest ever, because it had 70mph forward speed so it didn’t have much time to do damage. While that is true to a certain degree, if you took the rotational speed completely out of the picture, that’s still a massive wall of air, moisture, and degree, slamming into you at highway speeds. That alone would be enough to cause some very serious damage. So when you add in 300mph rotation with that, it becomes unimaginable. Which is why a lot of those 2011 tornadoes were so bad, because they all had very high ground speeds. That being said, I think there’s probably a balance between when something moving so slow that it sits on top of you for minutes on end, being better than it being a bit stronger and moving faster. I’d love to see some simulations comparing the same conditions for a tornado with one moving slow, versus fast; otherwise it being the exact same, and seeing the difference in damages. I would believe in some cases it would be better, or worse, given a certain set of circumstances
13:55 holy crap that one actually took two distinct steps I've never seen this one before that's terrifying
I remember this storm from when I was in kindergarten. We lived about 20 miles from Jerrell at the time, and had to take shelter during the same storm. Though no tornados hit our neighborhood, I remember hiding in the closet under the stairs with my mom and the family pets. We had only moved to Texas a few months before the storm from the Colorado Front Range and had no idea what to do in a tornado warning, so we put on bike helmets and filled the closet with couch cushions. I remember emerging from the closet hours later when my dad got home from work, and we spent the evening in a daze like we had just survived a war. Watching the devastation in Jerrell on the news that night was unnerving, knowing how close we were to that being us.
My mom resolved to leave Texas after that storm, and we returned to Colorado before the end of the year. We've dealt with wildfires and blizzards since then, but I'll take them over tornadoes in a heartbeat.
This is in terms of geography, the closest F5 tornado to my hometown. My mom has a friend who was good friends with the Igo family that were killed in this storm. This was not a good day for Central Texas as a whole.
I can’t imagine a whole family you know just gone like that. Just unreal.
Same! Storm chaser from Georgetown here
As someone who lives in Austin, my grandparents also knew this family from church. Devastating.
The closest to me was the Tuscaloosa one.
I remember coming back home from my friend's house that day and my mom had channel 2 and 3 going watching the newsfeed
(I'm from Waco)
The Jerrel, Texas tornado was truly a terrifying vortex and the infamous Dead Man Walking footage never ceases to send chills down my spine when the vortex was transitioning from a rope to a large wedge combined with its slow forward moving speed of 5-10 miles an hour, it's almost like the twister was alive.
Tornadoes are finally a recognized weather phenomenon in my country, a bunch of villages got wrecked by tornados, Denmark of all places.
They called me nuts but I just looked up frequently enough. "Damaging land going water spouts" have been recognized in the past.
This is absolutely crazy though, rope tornados can be seriously unpredictable
Finnish counterpoint: it's not that they don't occur at all, they are just less frequent in Europe (since the circumstances that create them are less likely to occur than they are in the US), and at least in Finland it's called trombi, not tornado, if it's on the news since that's the more European word for it. So stuff like that may confuse a "lay person" who thinks of tornadoes as something that happens in American cartoons. But I'm pretty sure you don't live in the dark ages over there and the meteorologists know that a tornado can indeed occur anywhere. I guess maybe your friends or acquaintances might have found the thought strange, though, since in the end they are really rare as far as weather phenomena goes.
@@MiroDaisuke They actually have gotten steadily more common since around 2019, they tear up forests and throw around trampolines, they also happen a bunch in the UK but they are rarely reported on.
Recognized as in you guys refused to believe they existed? Haha jk
@@samtron5000 the Meteorological Institute of Denmark refused to acknowledge tornados as a phenomenon that can occur around here. This was quite weird, especially considering that there is a historically documented tornado related disaster in the town of Holstebro back in the 60's, in which an F2-F3 caused severe damage. Smelled a bit like insurance company disaster denialism. Now every single journo around here cites ESWD and eye witness sources, video footage, etc, and the institute now recognizes tornados in the rotten old state of Denmark.
@@homeopathicfossil-fuels4789 This is really fascinating! I currently study a MA in History at Aarhus university and I am actually really interested in this - I've been trying to find ways to bring the weather into my field. 👀
I live in Temple TX which is about 15 minutes north of Jarrell. Anyway I watched a news channel doing the 25 year anniversary and a guy who helped recover bodies said this “After the tornado, we didn’t find bodies, we found people in pieces” he said they were literally shredded into parts 🤮
Yes, I grew up, and still live, in the DFW metroplex but we had just moved out of Williamson county that same month, after spending 2 years in Austin. I was 8 when this Tornado hit Jarrell and watching that news piece and listening to that man say that about recovering body parts brought up those same feelings I had as a kid seeing pictures of the livestock that died in Double Creek Estates. I’m thankful I didn’t know anyone had died there until I was much older. Nightmare fuel. 😰
That was terrifying damn. How could tornado shredded a person into pieces just like that?.
@ I don’t know. Think about the spinning and the pressure. Think about the wind spinning at 200 plus mph. That’s enough to shred anything. That’s what happens to tree barks. And if they’re strong enough I’ve seen photos where F5 tornadoes have stripped Asphalt from the street.
@@Nefertiti0403it's not the wind itself, it's what the wind carries with it that shreds people
@ Well that can also be true But For You or anyone simply Say “Oh No it’s Not the wind! It’s what’s in The Tornado” that’s just straight up Asinine and Ridiculous
Been waiting for you to do a video on Jarrell. That tornado was something evil. I hope nothing like that ever happens again.
I grew up in Waco. Ill never forget that day. I had just finished 7th grade. My mother and I raced home to take shelter when the sirens went off. Fortunately the storm was to our south so it wasn't a danger for us. I watched the news coverage all day and into the night as the aftermath was being covered. Ill never forget it. It made such an impact on me.
This tornado literally goes. Hey, I’m gonna go through freaking METAL RECYCLING facility, grab a whole bunch of shrapnel, steer right into a couple of houses and then sit on top of the rest.. then just go to the woods and vanish…. Like wth.. it’s always baffled me… like evil incarnate or something
That's god for you
The devil went down to Jarrel....
The jarrell tornado is different. It feels more evil than the other tornados
It was. The victims and cattle were maimed and stripped off of their flesh. Dental records were required to identify the citizens
It felt malicious, the way it just stopped on Double Creeks and completely obliterated it. And of course, the infamous Dead Man Walking photo.
@@OrionDawn15yeah. I know tornados aren't alive or sentient but it's like it had a goal to make sure that the people who lived there were dead.
@@Firemarioflowerthe search and rescue had a hard time trying to identify the remains of the people from the remains of livestock.
No one deserved this terrible thing.
@@-SpaceFrog- Indeed.
I live in Jarrell and read about the tornado. Reading and researching didn't prepare me to look at how close the site was to where I live now. Terrifying but really good to see. Wonder if the town still has sirens now..
If Jarrell doesnt have tornado sirens I would be absolutely astounded, and you should write your city council, or congressman immediately.
@@skrounst Yea, especially with the rapid growth in the entire I35 corridor from north Austin up to Jarrell. With the number of new subdivisions a similar storm would be far more devastating.
Interestingly enough the house I lived in would have been in the path of the tornado that hit the grocery store in Cedar Park on that same day. It was built years later, but when I put the damage path of the tornadoes that day on the map it was square in the center of that particular tornado.
As someone who lives in jarrell i can 100% say we don't have outdoor sirens. We rely on our phones to give us the alert
@samanthasims9392 i learned this after moving here. Now I hope my emergency alerts work on my phone! I'm still fresh to the area so thank you for confirming what I was able to find so far.
Watching this with a pine tree crashed into my home after hurricane helene hits different.
💀☠️💀💀☠️💀☠️💀☠️
Same lmao
To me the scariest part of this is that so many of those who died were doing what they were supposed to do: sheltering in an interior room. Many of them even came home early, thinking they would be safer at home. This sort of thing is why, if I ever move back to a tornado-prone region, I will not have a house without a basement, and even then, I plan to save up for a shelter.
The family that had a tornado shelter within the Double Creek estate who survived along with their neighbors inside of it had only built it because they survived a previous tornado.
Wow, quality contents thanks swegle studios!
0:50 Man, that new intro is fantastic!
Madonna
3:07 you saw how the tv in the back became Nord vpn
4:53 is even better. 😁⏭️
I lived 15 miles from Jarrell and I remember how scary this day was. The tornado sirens went off multiple times.
My whole family was shocked and saddened when we found out the extent of the Jarrell F5.
best tornado channel
You mean best turnado channel? Like the physics channel that talks about the nucular reactor.
The most fascinating tornado of all time, it’s terrible and terrifying
I lived in Killeen for two years, which is about 20 minutes north of Jarrell, so was able to go see the memorial site. I’ve been to the Twistex memorial in El Reno and also the Plaza Towers Elementary Memorial in Moore and Jarrell is without a doubt the most chilling. It really changes your perspective being there. Like I get caught up in the statistics and shock of all the record breaking tornadoes and tend to lose appreciation for the human factor, but that shit will humble you quick.
I was gonna say it seems like an odd choice to cover this since it’s been done so extensively the past few years (even by you with the dead man walking lore), but I still enjoyed this. Not a lot of people talk about that gap of time between what is seemingly two tornadoes, and also I don’t think many people have shown Google earth pics either. Nice job.
I have always been so sad that there is no footage of the actual moment the tornado went from rope-like to wedge. I want to think it was the same Tornado, as they just makes this tornado all the more mysterious and intriguing. The 'Jarrel Dead-Man Walking F5' Tornado will always be one of my "favorite" tornados of all time. Ty for this awesome vid! (i always get so excited for new vids about this tornado even tho I have seen EVERY bit of footage/pics/ect that is currently known of this tornado---i never get tired of seeing it again and again!
Rumor has it that guy is still calling for Debbie
😂😂😂
I was waiting for him to ask her to get his pants.
DEBBIE!
Dibbie!!!
DEBBIE
Swegle, I feel like I’ve watched dozens of videos on this tornado and have learned everything there is to learn about it-but you managed to bring a whole new perspective. You shared so much footage and info that I’ve never seen before. Your TH-cam channel is absolutely outstanding, you deserve all the flowers!!
0:42 I saw you sneak in the GOAT James Spann yet again. Part of the reason I love your videos!
Also the monster F5 started out as a tiiiny lil fella. Its amazing how it can go from. Oooo a tornado to a holy hell we are all gonna die tornado
I made the drive from San Antonio to Dallas, TX today. I have lived in both Austin, Dallas, & SATX before, so I have driven this route many times, and every time I run through Jarrell I think of what happened 27 years ago. I actually stopped at the Bell County Northbound rest stop that you mentioned at 10:09 just earlier today. Neat & interesting timing to see this posted, I love your content and thanks. Touching video
I was probably 7 or 8 when this happened. I lived just on the outskirts of Jarrel and I was so fascinated by the weather change even as a kid despite it being so scary at the same time. I remember taking shelter in an HEB bread aisle as the sirens went off. But I still think this event made me more excited about storms than sunny weather ever since then, it definitely left an impression on me.
The retro aesthetic you use is therapeutic for me. So many core memories for a guy born in '95 right before everything went digital. Love it! Not to mention the 10/10 actual content. KEEP IT COMIN!
11:43 wow, just one cloud in sight that looks very bright, and vivid, and then the tornado looked like it got sucked up by it
Awesome video! Also, I love how you got a repeat of the Weather Channels local forecast on a Commodore 1702. A mix of 80s/90's nostalgia there. I love it!
I just want to let you know that "The Swegle" is what I call your mustache.
As someone who watched it from there backyard.. it was the same one. I will forever have that moment etched in my mind. The feel of the world just standing still for a moment and then you just saw it. I never want to see in person a tornado again
From 1997, the Jarrell, Texas tornado is indeed the most terrifying and horrible tornado before the Oklahoma ones in 1999.
I have a video suggestion It’s about tornado valley Shifting or growing towards the eastern united states
We can’t conclude that tornado alley is shifting based off of a decade or two worth of mega outbreaks. That’s why meteorologists call the south Dixie alley and the traditional alley tornado alley. There hasn’t been enough time to determine whether this is just a fluke or a new trend. However, Kansas and Oklahoma are still top for violent and long lived EF 5 tornadoes.
@@JustinLHopkins The fact that the NWS effectively stopped handing out EF5 ratings doesn't help either. Several storms that could really start to shift the numbers eastward have all been given EF4 for some dubious reasons.
17:23
Fun fact about the igos: They were the family that contributed the most to the community, and as an honor, they had their own elementary school built
I’m coming back to my weather nerd phase and this is now one of my favorite channels. Thank you, Mr. Swegle.
YAY! Always love seeing a new Sweg vid!!
I would love to see more of these documentaries from you. You have a knack for storytelling and you seem show a lot more actual footage than some of the other weather doc channels
15:00 I've always felt that this tornado, more than any other, is indicative of an extremely efficient machine whose job was simple; grind everything in its path into a fine powder that it was to disperse, which it did.
Well put.
I survived the Cedar Park tornado with my family from the same system as it hopped over our house while we were in a central closet. There were cracks along the foundation from the tornado trying to pick up the house. The scenes from Jarrell are seared into my memory forever. We were so fortunate. I had no idea until recently, coming across your videos that the Jarrell tornado was so infamous among tornado enthusiasts. Keep up the amazing work, dude. Your videos are fantastic and exceptionally well made.
In my opinion this tornado is the closest to an F6 we've have ever seen.
We have had an f6 Tri state
@@Yeeper-omsj The TST was not an F6. It's official rating is F5.
The totality of the damage is because of the slow crawl it did over the landscape. The winds themselves were not even close to record-setting. Bridge-Creek 1999, Smithville 2011 and El Reno 2013 were all MUCH more powerful.
@@Astro95Mediafinally a guy who knows what hes talking about
Thank you so much. Currently sick on the couch. Missed several days of work but your video made my day
when tornadoes does weird formations, it will always be creepy.
YESSSSS!!!
I must say the aesthetic of your intros are so nostalgic 🥹
08:44 This is a very strong, narrow, rope-shaped deposition “engine” driven tornado (depo). This depo is exhibiting, uncommon, but not rare, vertical suction. As such it’s feeding condensation nuclei (CCN) into the lower levels of storm’s/cloud’s core/mesocyclone (meso).
11:44 Rich with CCN, the meso began to condense more water vapor (H2Og) in its lower and warmer levels. The depo, starved of H2Og, was choked off. A new hybrid deposition and condensation “engine” formed in a zone of the meso between its extremely cold heights and warmer bottom. This produced the transitionary stovepipe-shaped tornado.
14:16 So much condensation is happening in the meso’s warner bottom levels that it’s hybrid “engine” is being replaced by a condensation driven “engine.” As such, the tornado is becoming more wedge-shaped.
14:46 Now a full on wedge-shaped condensation driven tornado (conden). Notice its strong vertical suction, a common trait of condens. This suction magnifies the effects of the tornado’s winds.
14:29 Beckwith’s photos capture this storm’s meso’s multiple tornado transformations so well.
i love this new kind of video covering specific crazy weather events! please make it a series!! you perfectly infuse the facts & history with your charisma & it makes learning about something that usually requires a watching a documentary or two sanitized of personality. from one weather enthusiast to another, your excitement about these phenomena is palpable & your way of bringing up “conspiracies” as a punchline keeps it grounded. ill wait for my bell to ring! keep up the awesome work
You know it’s a great day when swegle posts
insert buzz lightyear factory meme
@@fishfathersgaming571 real
Congratulations on what is easily the most superior documentary I've ever seen about the Jerrell Tornado. Well done!
Right as I get off of practice, great timing!
You’re seriously my favorite weather phenomenon channel. So informative, with the most amazing clips.
You have got me interested in tornadoes now,you are that good😃
Gotta love when swegle uploads a tornado related video.
YEAAAAA SWEGLE STUDIOS UPLOAD LETS GOOOOOOOOO
Got ready for work a bit early. Loved being able to put this on to past the time! Thanks Swegle for the awesome and consistent content!!
Hey Swegle, could you review the 3-3-19 Beauregard Tornado? It is very unheard of, but it was a wedge that was filmed around many locations and had over 30+ deaths!
Hearing the stories of those lost always saddens me. When seeing a photo of the entire family lost, it's a sucker punch for sure. When Googled, I discovered the Igos, Smith, and Moehring families are buried in the same cemetery. The cemetery even widened the plots so that each family could be together as one family. 😢
18:59 are those tracks from vortices on the ground? that looks like literal hell on earth.
That’s what I wanna know too! Are they tracks from the vortices or just tracks from cars afterwards looking for survivors and cleaning up
@@AudraK Tire tracks from rescue and clean-up. Sub-vortex tracks have much bigger arcs around the main circulation.
The Jarrell F5 is the most amazing tornado. I thought I’d learned about it from your channel - guess not. 😳 Excellent video, good remembrance of the perished.
Always nice seeing your videos man love them!!
I always love the way your intros looked, this new one looks great and the old one looked retro
The Jarrell tornado is an equivalent IMO to the Pokemon evolution from Magikarp to Gyarados. 😮
I genuinely adore this analogy! Good call!
There was never a more GenY-appropriate analogy. Well done.
Glad you covered this tornado. One of the most fascinating and devastating I've ever read about.
13:28 a tornado is already terrifying, but a tornado that forms hands is a whole new story of scary😱😱
Jarrell has haunted ne for years, such an intriguing tornado. Terrible for the poor souls caught in its path-hard to imagine a more terrifying spot to be in. Great video and channel....
Jarrell F5 is the first F5 tornado in my lifetime. And it is creepy.
Thank you for pointing out why this part of Texas doesn't have basements!
Our soil is very heavy clay. When it's dry, it shrinks and becomes very hard. This makes for flash foods AND shifting foundations. We literally "water our foundations" here to try to reduce foundation shifting and cracking. All homes will eventually develop drywall cracks. So, imagine trying to build a basement. It'll crack, shift, and flood after a couple of years. And then put a house on that big ol' hole? Nope. No basements here.
0:20 and why are you rocking a mustache?!?!
He is a father of twins and married… yk what that means for men… dad mustaches 😎
Finally another Swegle Studios tornado breakdown!!
5:17 you spoke fast as HELL right there what happened LMAO
LMAOOOO
I was 10 years old and lived in Georgetown, a town just south of Jarrell when it happened. I will never forget that day. It sounded like a train and the sky got so dark and had such a weird feel to the atmosphere. It seemed almost like a green color.
We drove by the Albertsons afterward and the devastation was shocking. I heard the people inside survived by taking shelter inside the store's freezer.
Another great documentary about this fascinatinng tornado! Would love a video about the 1990 Plainfield F5. Being my hometown, your videos have inspired my to look for remnants and I have thought about digging deeper to find any information about the tornado from local sources. I would love to share anything I find.
i remember my grandfather driving me through the damage. It was terrifying.
@@TheScottishbear I can only imagine. I drove through Joplin not long after the tornado and it's hard to even process what you're seeing.
VERY unusual for an EF5 to move to the southwest. Another EF5 was the Rocksprings, TX tornado of April 12, 1927 which killed 72 ( 2nd highest in Texas history). It moved southeast for 60 miles. The atmospheric setup may have been similar that day.
13:30 freaky tornado
As someone (a DFW resident) who has been to Waco and everywhere in between for football games at my school this is criminally insane how these big ass tornadoes hit our state. I remember that my town Cleburne had a terrible F3 back in 2013, it was actually so crazy even my old school had a giant metal capsule crashed into the second floor. I remember my mom taught a guy whose house was ripped apart by that tornado, he is now a school teacher and his story was on the news. Several residents in Grandbury were even killed in that same F3 I think. This was a year right before I moved to Cleburne, however my hometown Fort Worth has seen far worse in its time.
Thanks! Now I have " 🎶 Open Your Heart To Me 🎶" stuck in my head lol
i was trying to remember the name of the song lol, also i love this version in the intro
Yeah same
Man, I watch these old tornado videos, and it brings me chills. Then I see the traffic on the roads and it makes me want to go back in time just for the vehicles.
you should make a video on the greenfield tornado. since the dow had over 300 mph winds on it.
LOVE LOVE LOVE THE INTRO MY DUDE❤ Best tornado content out there! I live out here in ATX and love this doc.
This is a great surprise, there aren’t enough pieces on this mortifying tornado. Thank you for contributing, top-notch video as always 👏
Insane timing. I drove nearby Jarrell for the first time in my life today and I’ve been thinking about this Nader all day long.
I’m fascinated yet terrified of tornados. My wife was stationed at Fort Hood last year so we moved to Killeen, TX. It was only after we were settled in that I realized how close Jarrell was to there 😩😂 doesn’t help my tornado anxiety
I lived through this. We lived in Theon, TX just across the interstate. I went to school in Jarrell. Not sure why it popped into my feed but these are memories I have tried to forget. The video and photos can't truly describe what this day was like.
Love this channel
I think another reason people are so fascinated with this tornado is the damage it inflicted on the victims. People have always been interested in the gruesome nature of death and this one produced some of the more disturbing deaths relating to a tornado, which makes it extra terrifying.
If this specific tornado had hit a larger city, it would've been worse than Joplin.
Yeah, like Moore I know that Moore is also a pretty small town, but it’s like right next to Oklahoma City
@@Golden_retriever_frien
It would've been even worse than Moore or El Reno.
Because it would've moved at 5 mph or slower, doing even more damage than those other two ever did...
@@TheSkyGuy77 yeah but still both of those towns are close to Oklahoma City and Oklahoma City is a very largely populated area that’s notorious for getting tornadoes. If this tornado specifically hit one of those towns it would cause a min damage to Oklahoma City and who knows what would happen to some people who lived in Oklahoma City near Moore or El Reno
Imagine if this tornado would've hit downtown Dallas, or a suburb like University Park.
Great video as always, Jake - digging the new opening credits, not so sure about the new set, loved the dark feel of the old one. As always, incredibly done, well researched, and highly informative as well as entertaining - keep it up!
Moral of the story: the Jarrell f5 tornado was built different
And it’s child the El Reno tornado was also built different just not as built different as the Jarrell
It was basically the worst case scenario for a tornado.
A slow moving, 200+ mph wind inducing, drill bit.
Thank goodness it didn't hit a city.