So many heroes. Throughout the summer National Guardsmen kept watch over Wheatland and Atlantic. The former Thrift Drug Co. sent 5,000 pounds of items to the Shenango Valley. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration We could see supercells developing north of Lake Erie and racing northeast. An ATM surveillance camera at the First State Bank in Parkersburg, Iowa, shows a house across the street being hit by an EF5 tornado with estimated winds of . Over the past 21-22 years, I have also worked in Birmingham, AL, Blacksburg, VA, and now as a Lead Forecaster in Columbia, SC. Vehicles were thrown more than 100yd (300ft). Low around 35F. The Allegheny National Forest experienced a large amount of valuable timber loss from these two tornadoes. As the first reports of damage trickled in to the National Weather Service offices in the area, it quickly became clear that a tornado outbreak of an unprecedented magnitude was taking place across the region. Wheatland Tube contributed $150,000 to create two disaster funds in its devastated town. The day was May 31, 1985. I thanked him for the report and told him I would pass the information onto the Harrisburg WSO who had warning responsibility for Clinton. Grazulis also called into question the ratings of several tornadoes currently rated F5 by official sources. We were unable to track a subsequent, deadly tornado that roared through the Elimsport/Watsontown areas. What remains are memories, emotions and for many, renewed strength. Every tree was twisted, splintered, and covered with mud. Some sources estimate that in todays dollars, the damage would be in excess of $1.2 billion. I was assigned the task of handing out vouchers. According to the NWS Cleveland, OH (2019), this is a classic signature of severe weather outbreaks for this region. Eventually the storm debris was cleared away, insurance claims were paid and homes, businesses and shattered lives were rebuilt. References, Additional Links, and Acknowledgements It took until 5 through Friday afternoon rush hour traffic to get back to the our office. It is described as a "possible" F5. The same supercell dropped another tornado right across the state line in Pennsylvania 15 minutes later and killed 9 people in Big Beaver, Pennsylvania. I drew on that experience numerous times in the decades ahead, mostly in storm-prone central Illinois. The threat of severe weather was so great that we had actually headlined the possibility in the zone forecasts at 4 AM on the previous midnight shift. I remember about 4:00-4:30 in the afternoon a few coming into the Penn State weather station to check on whether the anticipated severe weather outbreak had gotten going. Given the heavy rain, I did not see anything in the way of a wall cloud or tornado. Many of us have wondered if the Moshannon tornado reached F5 strength at some point, but it moved only through unpopulated areas (fortunately), so no evidence of F5 damage was found. May 31, 1985 was a Friday during the period between spring semester and summer session, but many graduate students remained in town working. Thinking that someone might need help, we circled over the area for several minutes trying to locate someone but were never able to find anyone. Over a thousand homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed in the county. Nothing was happening on our side of the lakes. Cars flipped around every which way. Greg Forbes, myself, Fred [Gadomski], and Paul [Knight] were mesmerized by the radarand, out of the dead silence, Greg pronounced that "People are dying right now." Instantly it became very dark; I ran to my bedroom to find a pair of shoes but the power went out at that moment and I couldn't see to find the shoes. The strength of the front and the degree of instability lead to the erosion or breaking of the cap and thunderstorms exploded with violent results. More on that later. All of us were heartbroken for him. This is the story behind the F5 tornado. Tornado watches in Philadelphia are new to this region. Many homes in town were destroyed, some of which were swept away with very little debris left. FROM 500 PM EDT UNTIL 1100 PM THIS FRIDAYAFTERNOON AND EVENING. Greg Forbes recalled that an outbreak had been expected, but no one expected this. 43 tornadoes and numerous damaging thunderstorms tore across Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ontario. No earlier tornadoes will be reclassified on the Enhanced Fujita scale, and no new tornadoes in the United States will be rated on the original Fujita scale. Weather Prediction Center Two barns were leveled and a pickup truck was carried .5mi (0.80km) through the air. We knew we had windsbacking with height from southeast to southwest aloft and increasing with height. According to NOAA (2019), the F5 tornado killed 18 people, injured 310 and caused $750 million dollars in damage. Eleven farms were completely leveled or swept away. Twenty-one tornadoes tracked across Northeast Ohio and Northwest Pennsylvania during the evening of May 31st. I was to work from the church. An entire wall of a home was carried for 14mi (23km). I heard a rumor. The outbreak produced several strong tornadoes in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maryland areas that were falsely believed to be immune to tornadoes. Much of the nations land is uninhabited or un-built-upon. They are a measure of the conditions (temperature, dewpoints, wind speed and direction) above the surface of the Earth. rain, hail and sometimes debris caused by the tornado, spiraling inward around the tornado circulation. The first hour or so of the shift was comparatively quiet; it took awhile before the first damage and injury/death reports made their way through the teletype circuits (the teletype or "Comms" room through which SELS received most damage reports at the time would close later the same year). The first of two F4 tornadoes to affect the county touched down just west of the Pennsylvania state line around 5 p.m. On this date 35 years ago, the deadliest tornado outbreak in the states history cut through the heartland of Pennsylvania, killed 64 people, and spawned the states only F5 tornado on record, with peak winds better than 200 mph. This sounding is quite impressive for a late-May morning and quite favorable for tornadoes. Just after 4 p.m., the Cleveland weather service office posted a thunderstorm warning, and it quickly became clear that a tornado outbreak of an unprecedented magnitude was taking place.. I was fascinated bythe power of the atmosphere. One book led to another and another and another, and the rest is history. One station I was updating was WKZA in Kane, a daytime only AM station (it no longer exists). At the Pittsburgh Office, the hours from 5 PM to 8 PM were consumed with issuing tornado warnings for monster storms in Mercer (F5 that went through Wheatland), Beaver (F3 through Big Beaver) and into southern Butler county. (1986), an unseasonably strong low pressure center tracked across upper Michigan during the morning hours to just north of Sudbury by evening. tornadoes officially rated F4/EF4 or equivalent, FlintWorcester tornado outbreak sequence, May 1957 Central Plains tornado outbreak sequence, Tornado outbreak sequence of December 1820, 1957, 1985 United States-Canadian tornado outbreak, 2011 FyffeRainsvilleSylvaniaIder, Alabama/Rising Fawn, Georgia tornado, 2011 HintonEl RenoPiedmontGuthrie, Oklahoma tornado, March 1952 Southern United States tornado outbreak, Tornado outbreak sequence of May 2126, 2011, Late-May 1998 tornado outbreak and derecho, Tornado outbreak sequence of May 2226, 2016, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, List of F4 and EF4 tornadoes (2020present), List of tornadoes striking downtown areas, "Top ten weather stories for 2007: Canada's First F5 Tornado", "A Multiscale Overview of the el Reno, Oklahoma, Tornadic Supercell of 31 May 2013", "Supercell tornadoes are much stronger and wider than damage-based ratings indicate", "F5 and EF5 Tornadoes of the United States", "1998-1999 Tornadoes and a Long-Term U.S. Tornado Climatology", "T. Theodore Fujita: His Contribution to Tornado Knowledge through Damage Documentation and the Fujita Scale", Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 10.1175/1520-0477(2001)000<0063:TTFHCT>2.3.CO;2, "Beschreibung des Orcans, welcher den 29. The original F-Scale historical data base will not change. I was much more interested in baseball than weather then, though we recently completed a weather unit in school in which tornadoes were among the topics. Most of Wheatlands businesses and industries were destroyed or badly damaged including Yourga Trucking, B&D Trucking, Steel Trucking, R&J Trucking, Sharon Metal Fence, Wheatland Tube Co., two plants of Sawhill Tubular Products, N/S Corp., William Orr Co. and a Bell of Pennsylvania maintenance garage. Resulting in 34 deaths, the Xenia tornado was the deadliest of all tornadoes from this outbreak and remains among the top 10 costliest U.S. tornadoes on record (approximately $250 million in 1974). I never, ever forgot that moment. The remaining residents have rebuilt their homes and lives and the area remains a beautiful place to live and work. Retrieved from: https://www.weather.gov/ctp/TornadoOutbreak_May311985#MeteorologyM. Following two particularly devastating tornadoes in 1997 and 1999, engineers questioned the reliability of the Fujita scale. TOWARDS THE EAST AT 35 MPH. We had colder air aloft movingover the western Great Lakes with a jet max rotating around the south side of the approaching trough. At 21Z (5:00 pm EDT), the cold front was in western Ontario (Figure 10). A farm was completely leveled, and a child was reportedly carried .5mi (0.80km) away. Well-built homes were swept away in four counties with F5 damage in the town of Pomeroy. So many lives affected. For more recent tornadoes, clicking. As you can see from this GOES satellite image, the storm covered much of the region and was concentrated mainly over . Widely accepted as an F5 tornado, including within the NCDC Technical Memorandum; however, it is listed as an F4 in the official databases. After 8 PM, the outflow from the Big Beaver storm initiated a new storm that produced an F1 short track tornado in East Sparta, OH just west of the Pittsburgh WSR-57 radar. 1764 einen Strich von etlichen Meilen im Stargardischen Kreise des Herzogthums Mecklenburg gewaltig verwstet hat", "A violent tornado in mid-18th century Germany: the Genzmer Report", "Tornade EF5 Montville (Seine-Maritime) le 19 aot 1845", "Severe Storms Archive - Tornado 21 Feb 1876 to 22 Feb 1876", "The Great Plains Tornado Outbreak and Blackwell Tornado of 25-26 May 1955", "A Case Study in Forensic Meteorology: Investigating the 3 April 1956 Tornadoes in Western Lower Michigan | Ostuno | E-Journal of Severe Storms Meteorology", "1956 Tornado Outbreak: Vriesland to Trufant Tornado - Eyewitness Accounts", "Wichita Falls, TX Tornado, Apr 1964 - Twister Slams Wichita Falls | GenDisasters Genealogy in Tragedy, Disasters, Fires, Floods", "May 5, 1964: F5 Tornado Tracks From Adams To Butler County", "NWS Jackson, MS - Mar. I turned around when a lightning bolt struck close to my car. PARTS OF SOUTHWEST NEW YORK On a personal note, my family had some connections to the affected area. Along the way, the town of Atlantic was virtually destroyed. Of these twenty-one, one was rated an F5, and six were rated F4s. Those who came to me to be interviewed looked like the walking dead. When I got home, I sat down for some dinner and to watch a video I had rented for a Friday night movie. StormReady Officially rated F4 but images show possible T10/low-end F5 damage. European Severe Storms Laboratory). European Severe Storms Laboratory). I can also remember all the tornado warnings that were issued for the area as the storms moved in. We had been expecting a severe weather outbreak over parts of the Ohio Valley that day; a weaker disturbance preceding the one responsible for the31 Mayevent had caused two rounds of severe weather in the Kansas City the previous day; one of these sent softball-sized stones through the roof of a co-worker who lived just a mile or so north of where I did around dawn on the morning of the 30th. This day remains the deadliest tornado outbreak ever documented in Pennsylvania. However, in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, conditions usually arent as favorable for tornadoes. [12][13], The tornadoes on this list have been formally rated F5 by an official government source. This tornado outbreak left a permanent impact on those affected. This area is very hilly terrain and the tornado did not skip from one hill to the next, but went right down into the valley and up the other side for a far as the eye could see. Chance Haynes from NWS in. Six hundred buildings were destroyed, and some areas were swept clean of all debris. This was the deadliest tornado outbreak of the 1980s, killing 89 people, injuring more . Summer president Brian Orzel updated all of the CWSs radio stations with tornado watch information hours before the storms hit. The tornado was still in the air above my head- things were swirling around. One F5 tornado hit Wheatland, PA and it remained the only F5 to hit east of the Mississippi River until 2011. The storm was developing aloft and remain aloft across all of Clarion County. For a horrifying day, a tornado alley cut through Pennsylvania. I can only image the forecasters that surveyed the tornado damage from the May 31st, 1985 outbreak felt the same as I did when they viewed the destruction. At any rate, I immediately decided I wanted to be a meteorologist. US Dept of Commerce The diverse air masses clearly have a whole lot to do with igniting the supercell thunderstorms that are the source of some of the most dangerous tornadoes, but indicting those ingredients alone would be a gross oversimplification, according to the Storm Prediction Center. I remember driving north into the Moshannon area into a nasty thunderstorm with heavy rain, a lot of lightning, and some wind. That said, a powerful tornado that packed winds up to 200 mph took away a house and killed three people in Limerick, Montgomery County, in July 1994, and a killer tornado struck the Philadelphia region, heavily damaging parts of Bucks and Montgomery Counties and leaving four people dead, on May 28, 1896.
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