sojitodd

Lilly Chapel is just a few miles south/southeast of where I am. They are showing wires down and a barn destroyed but I have no idea if it is tornado related damage(although the barn looked pretty well demolished.)

I live right by West Jefferson and I saw the rotation just south of me moving northeast. Very cool. I did not see any tornado but that area where it would have been was blocked by a house. The rotation is over West Jefferson right now. There were also some law enforcement vehicles parked around with their lights on monitoring it-they have moved on now. Just very heavy rain now.

Cannot believe we had a tornado warning yesterday. And they are going to conduct a damage survey for what they believe was a tornado touchdown in Clark County. On February 7!!!

car is already covered in West Jeff....let's go for it!!!!

damn! I remember being up all night and you were one of the ones up late too...amazed that the Scioto valley (normally WTOD) was the jackpot) and watching the heavy snow and being amazed that for ONCE! CMH had the highest reading at over 20 inches! lol. And no other city in the United States matched us!(only Ottawa Canada tied us for the amount). Classic, classic winter weather!!!!!! Did not harm anyone, not a terrible, fierce storm, just a blizzard warning(without a real blizzard)and everyone was prepared, nobody died, and it melted away not too long after. It was the perfect storm! If only I live long enough to experience another one!

I was just about to go out and remove the snow off of my car and I opened the front door and a particularly howling blast of wind did it for me-took nearly all of the snow right off of it. Damn it is brutal out.

Living in the Columbus area is a snowstorm lover's special hell. 24 hours ago I was in the jackpot with 11 inches LOL...fooled again... All that is left is to lose power with it going below zero...

Worst possible storm ever. Ice over everything, pine out back has icicles 3 and 4 inches long hanging off it, winds getting ready to pick up, and not one flake of snow. Dammit. Everything but snow-which I don't want now with all the ice over everything.

Madison County in the crosshairs?-it will never happen! *Thank God the ice potential is way down though.

^^ Dammit I really do not want ice. But I guess it could be worse: from the Sierra Nevada...

Damn this has my area at 15 inches?...while CMH is at less than six? Damn. I hate these type of borderline storms. ANYTHING but an ice storm!

Please Jesus! no icestorm here! I can deal with heavy snow and even some wind(but no damn blizzard either) but NO. Damn. Ice!

About 5.5 inches here. Very nice and pretty snowfall, lots of evergreens hanging with all the snow. Sort of winter wonderlandish out.

Madison County upgraded to a Winter Storm Warning with totals expected to be 4-7 inches. I can't remember the last time we had a warning.

4.5 inches measured on a bench in my front yard not near any trees or anything. Cleared off 1 inch of snow off the car before noon and then between 3 and 4 inches about half past five this afternoon. Near West Jefferson. *What is that yellow/orange line advancing from the south into Madison County?...that had better not be non-snow precipitation. If it is I hope it does not make it here. No. Damn. Ice!

It is so damn sad that so many people who survived this horrific tornado are now succumbing to their injuries. I hope this is about the last of it, and I hope nearly everybody else who is injured is able to pull through and recover. Just a damn shame, especially for the families and friends. I guess this is to be expected with this tornado, but it still sucks.

Thanks for this reply JoMo. These are all good explanations imo and really help one to understand this whole tragedy a little better.

I wouldn't have felt uncomfortable either, except for including it with the other stuff I posted. I was thinking of making a separate post about it, and then saw that you had already done just that. I just did not want to combine the two(the technical aspects and the human impact stuff) in the same post. To me this is just a huge historical event-the deadliest single tornado in 64 years(probably since 1936 since the Woodward tornado was probably separate tornadoes imo)- just an extraordinary event and I want to know as much as I can about it. No single community has suffered this kind of loss of life since Tupelo and Gainesville in 1936-75 years! And it was not a 'mass casualty at a single facility' thing-it was just a massive tornado tearing through a town. Why was it so deadly-was it just that much stronger? I think it just has to be. Especially when so many other towns have been hit by large tornadoes since the thirties and nothing really approaches this one except for maybe Woodward and a few in the fifties.

I was going to include this in my last response and thought better of it, and now here you come and do it for me. lol. I didn't want to seem insensitive given the other stuff I was discussing, but yeah, I still want to know that info too. I just think it has to be over 210...given the amount of destruction and the death toll, plus that nine story hospital shifting on it's foundation(and being built to withstand 300mph winds and being not in the middle of the damage path) Are they still looking through the area to look for any signs of damage that would likely to have resulted from winds in excess of 210 mph?-I am not sure what that would be though, actually..

Ugh. So that brings it right back to the 142. Just still hard to believe that nearly 150 people died in this thing. And 3 million cubic yards of debris? -Sounds like something from a bombed German city back in World War Two! Hard to fathom it all. I can't bring myself to read the latest dr./responder account-the first one was traumatic enough to read.

I just knew you were going to post this-you seem more 'obsessed' with a final official peak value than I am(and yeah, I want to know too). I know it is just an estimate, but it is the 'official story' for the historical record...so I am waiting for it too. It can't be just 'over 200 mph'.

Well that is just awful. At least they have accounted for all the missing and that uncertainty is gone. I hope this is not too morbid or out of line, but does this mean that when they said they had 142 dead, that some of those remains turned out to be the same person? I am just asking because they kept specifically saying that they had 142 sets of remains, and now it is officialy 134 dead? With the horrific descriptions from the survivor's stories that you have posted, I could see how that could happen. I do not envy the people who had to deal with doing the identifications. Hopefully this closure is one of many that will help Joplin move forward from this historic tragedy.

BTW, the problem with the colors not matching is when they are overlayed-you are blending colors so they change-if you look at the colors individually(by ef#) they match the legend. Why I did not grasp that fact immediately, I don't know. *edit..nevermind, I see where Tornadytony already posted it. I missed that part.

I know..it is hard to believe-the ef5 is nearly 3 blocks wide near the high school-you very rarely see ef4 damage that wide-that is nearly as wide as the f4 damage in the Wichita Falls map. Good point about the death toll. Not to be morbid, but I wonder how a plot of known or estimated fatality locations would correspond to that map? I hope this gets 'straightened out' so to say regarding the ef5 'zone' and the maximum 3 second gust/wind. This is all going to be part of the historical record for this extreme tornado-they should do the best they can to get it right. This tornado is going to be the defining event as far as tornadoes go it seems.

I agree with your skepticism, but it still makes for one hell of a mesmerizing and incredible map!