Compare that to areas like the Oklahoma City, Birmingham/Tuscaloosa and Little Rock metros and it doesn't seem like a lot, although what matters is that Joplin got the big one just like Birmingham and OKC have gotten...
CNN's nonsense was even worse on the day of the April 27th outbreak and the aftermath, I don't even want to go there because it will piss me off, tbqh.
Almost certainly not the widest.
Although, it was similar to the Wichita Falls tornado in 1979 in that it had a wide swath of consistently catastrophic damage.
The Rainsville tornado from April 27th tore concrete porches from the ground, tore a stone pillar from a house/broke it in half and threw an 800 pound, anchored safe 600 feet and ripped the door from its hinges, so I'm not surprised a tornado of generally equal intensity would be capable of such incredible phenomena.
Yeah that part on the video on Youtube where Kathryn screams "BACK UP!" is scarily intense, and then part after you can just hear the desperation in Jeff's voice when he reports the magnitude of the situation.
"I have a very destructive, probably F4...maybe F5...goin' through the city of Joplin right now, on the south side of town and it's doin' massive destruction...It's...It's a mile wide tornado, It's tearin' up the entire city, I'm on the south side of Joplin right now..."
Still get chills from that.
Tuscaloosa, AL/Yazoo City, MS/etc.
Not to mention towns have been hit by multiple violent tornadoes in the same outbreaks (Tanner, AL - Super Outbreak, Elkhart, IN - Palm Sunday '65, Fridley, MN - May 6th, '65).
Forgot about this one....
I remember several of the original warning texts during the Apr. 27th Outbreak reading something like this:
I kind of thought that might be a good idea in the future, except to create the separate TORE category as mentioned above, perhaps with red text or something like in a PDS watch to highlight the threat of the situation.