Weather geeks: excerpts of week long forecasting of the 4/27/11 tornado outbreak

WHERE THE frick IS SLACKSTER

I love watching clips of James Spanns weather coverage on YouTube.

Love Talbots channel, was actually watching the hour and a half el Reno video earlier this week.

Everybody wanted to go South.

That day and the subsequent weeks living in Tuscaloosa is something that will stick with me for the rest of my life.

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James Spanns

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GOAT

That event was very well forecast, and the warnings issued that day were very timely, yet we still lost 252 people in Alabama that day. Very sad.

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Love Talbots channel, was actually watching the hour and a half el Reno video earlier this week.

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This one is really interesting. The El-Reno tornado was 2+ miles wide when it crossed highway 81, nearly twice as large as it was just a few minutes prior to the west of that location. A lot of people would have been killed if that tornado had materialized 10-12 miles east in the more densely populated OKC suburbs along I-40.

I actually read a bit about the El Reno tornado after it happened because some of the fatalities were experienced, educated researchers with a lot of experience documenting storms. They weren't locals with pickup trucks and cameras.

The size of that storm is what really astounds me. At some points, the intense damage path was nearly as wide as LSU's main campus (to put it into perspective).

I was in the OKC area few years ago and drove on Highway 81 south of El Reno. It's a wide, paved north/south highway with good sight lines and very few trees. I can see why so many photographers were staged right there. The Weather Channel's Suburban was rolled right there as they tried to escape south on that highway.

The people that were impacted in Reuter Rd. were in compact cars - one group of chasers were in a Chevrolet Cruze with a lot of awkward weather instruments mounted on the roof and a Toyota sub-compact car. I drove that gravel/washboard road (with open ditches on either side) in a brand new SUV and couldn't safely drive over 35 mph on a sunny day. I honestly couldn't imagine moving at half that speed with heavy cross wind and low visibility in a lighter car. That was a terrible escape route.

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True, but seriously, when the storms are that bad, what would most really do? The ol "center room, lowest floor" advice probably didn't work for many average built homes. I know if a major tornado had cut through our house like the many that occurred that day, I'm not so sure I'd still be here today. My home is on a slab, I have no safe room or shelter.

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I agree, there were people that day who did the right things, sought the best shelter they could, and still died. But I think a lot of people also did not take action when warnings were issued. Now, part of the issue with warnings that day were that so many people did not have power when things began that afternoon due to the storms that morning. That certainly made it harder for people to get warnings.

But yes, I agree, there are situations when you have large, violent tornadoes where even seeking shelter might not be good enough (if you don’t have a basement/storm room). I don’t know if it is true, but I’ve heard that there were people killed in Hackleburg, AL (hit by an EF-5 that day) that were in some type of storm pit/underground shelter.

Excellent first post. Maybe top 5 in the history of the OT, porn bombs not withstanding.

Hell of a first post.