My first post. Howdy, y’all.
I've learned a lot about tornado damage surveys working on my book about the Joplin tornado and the first ten years of the recovery (the book, and the recovery, are still in progress),
If it is not rated an EF5, people will howl. Communities take pride in surviving a major tornado. It’s a badge of honor. The worse it’s rated, the tougher they feel. Google the reaction in La Plata, MD when its 2002 EF5 was, upon further review, downgraded to EF4. There are still people who lobby to have the 1953 Worcester F4 promoted to an F5.
The rating is subjective. Enhanced Fujita is an enhanced guess, and open to difference of opinion among surveyors.
The survey process will be tough on the meteorologists who have never done it before. They are seeing, perhaps for the first time, the damage they warn people about, and meeting the people directly affected. The NWS Jarrell assessment noted, “The magnitude of this event made it emotionally troubling for every team member.” Somewhere in my notes is a comment by an NWS met after LeeCounty, saying that some mets (probably the younger ones) treated it all like a video game, with all the gee-whiz computer stuff, until something awful happened on their watch. Then, it became very, very real.
It would not surprise me at all to see construction quality mentioned a lot in the damage survey, and perhaps affect the rating. Two years after the Joplin tornado, the American Society of Civil Engineers reported it found no EF-5-level damage in Joplin. The ASCE did not say it wasn’t an EF-5, just that construction quality was so poor that buildings failed in far lesser winds. Ask Tim Marshall, Poor construction quality is its own pandemic. A lot of builders rely on gravity to keep a structure together. It works fine – until it doesn’t.
