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April 27, 2011 Tornado Outbreak


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According to the local news tonight, the number of missing persons in Tuscaloosa has risen to 458 confirmed. That seems like a very high number 5 days after an event and the mayor is "very concerned" about it. They also mentioned that operations are just now transitioning from "search and rescue" into "recovery".

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Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddux said late Saturday that 434 people were unaccounted for, down from 570 hours earlier.

------http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_severe_weather

FWIW

This afternoon's PC briefing Tuscaloosa Mayor give a number of 458 still missing and stated there was no duplicate names on the list....more assets being called in from other areas we know as I understand at least 4-5 cadaver teams and a specialized helicopter is searching during the night to continue the search.

I hope just maybe some left the city before it even happened "just in case" or maybe even were able to leave on there own after the TOR and with power outages still an issue in the area may not know they're on the list of the missing.....and if parents called to report missing and the child has come home surely they will call the city officials and let them know. Hopefully we can get this narrowed down/lowered soon otherwise we may be looking at weeks trying to find/locate the missing in the area.

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I would assume many of these either had been out of town beforehand or left soon after the event and just haven't communicated back. Would have figured a throrough enough search had been done of the worst affected areas to find a high percentage of the fatalities.

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Thanks. Yeah, looks pretty stable lately.

From a scientific and technical perspective I really think driving the FAR rate down is the most important (and doable) thing right now; it will in the long term really help public reaction.

So it's more understanding why tornadoes DON'T form rather than why they do form.

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I am not sure how correct or updated that is. Montgomery County, MD was tornado warned three different times and nothing on there shows it.

You're right. Looks like some polygons were missed. Here's LWX's warnings...

post-866-0-85789500-1304351270.jpg

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Well, I know that the local media in my area is kind of split on this issue in terms of how much they discuss it. Sometimes they talk about how important weather radios are, other times they push their own "instant notification" services where (usually for a small fee) you will received automated phone calls when a warning is issued. Which is fine too, I guess, in that it hopefully gives people the idea of how serious severe weather can be and how you won't always be in position to watch the updates on TV or someone's Twitter feed when it happens.

What I would hope is that there is some sort of ongoing nationwide campaign to get a weather radio into every home. Many fire departments and emergency managers advertise programs where you can get free smoke and carbon monoxide detectors for your home, and they're available all the time. In my town there was a general "safety fair" a few months ago where the local FD was giving away CO detectors, and they were handing out a LOT of them. There was a time not too long ago when most people didn't even know why you would even need a CO detector. Perhaps these outfits could offer weather radios in tandem with the other safety products. Having seasonal weather radio events is a good start, but why can't this be something that is "indoctrinated" into people, even kids, all the time, just as the importance of smoke detectors is now?

When you have folks that have weather radios, but keep them turned off because "they are annoying and wake them up at night"... there's just not a lot more you can do to get people to take the threat seriously. An extremely large amount of people in this area, at least, before Wednesday... had the mentality of "if it's my time, it's my time". People will not take a threat that inconveniences them seriously, unless they personally want to. That may change for a little while now, because of what happened, but you can't fix that with devices. A good bit of this comes down to personal responsibility.

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Not sure if this has been posted, but is that real?

From: http://www.noaanews....nformation.html

There's some unreal stats on there....

NWS’s preliminary estimate is that there have been more than 600 tornadoes thus far during the month of April 2011.

  • The previous record number of tornadoes during the month of April was 267 tornadoes set in April 1974.

  • The previous record number of tornadoes during any month was 542 tornadoes set in May 2003.

  • The average number of tornadoes for the month of April during the past decade is 161.

  • The overall monthly average number of tornadoes for the past decade is 106.

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Not sure if this has been posted, but is that real?

From: http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/april_2011_tornado_information.html

That seems weird. Even the preliminary map only has 267 reports for the 27th, and given the very long tracks with some of these tornadoes, I would think that the final number will be substantially lower.

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But what went wrong? I don't think anything did. People were warned, and I'm sure most of them did their best to take cover. It's sad, of course, but it doesn't surprise me. This is what happens when scores of large, powerful tornadoes plow into densely populated regions. No one did anything wrong-- it's just the natural order of things.

this is one of those cases where you can do everything right and still get killed. IF you are trying to compare the outbreak of 2011 with another one, there are many factors. Building codes are better, warnings are better, People are better educated and have many sources of information. IF this outbreak happened even 20 or 30 years ago you could be looking at 1,000s of dead.

Blame it on climate change or great Cthulhu rising from the dead, this series of events was comparable to the greats of the past. I submit that it a was even worse than the worse of the recorded events of the past.

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Doing some research this morning, I just realized that 2 or more F5s on the same day has happened several other times in addition to 74. I have always read that last weeks outbreak was the second instance of more than one F5 in a single day, but it happened on May 25th 1955 and May 15th, 1968 as well. In addition to the Super Outbreak in 74.

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I wanted to share this story on this board . Of all the suffering, death, destruction, and heart break that has occured during the April 27th outbreak in Alabama, this story of a whole family wiped out in our state, is the most hearting breaking. This is why we, as metorologists, weither professional or amateur, SKYWARN spotters, HAM operators, EMA, etc. strive as much as humanly possible, to prevent such a tragedy in any severe weather outbreak event by studing and analyizing over hours of data, fine tuning forecast after forecast, then issue warnings with such immense urgency and seriousness,, but even moreso in an historic tornado outbreak that we in Alabama and surrounding states experienced on April 27th. A Tornado Warning just has to be taken serious by the public at all times and not become complacent. Please remind each and every person that you come in contatct with again of just how deadly these storms are. This family seemed to do all they could at the time to protect themselves, their childern, and grandchildern, but as in many F4, and certainly F5 tornadic storms, one MUST be underground to survive IMO. This dear family was found holding on to each other from what I have read in other articles. May God bless all those who have lost and suffrered so much, this family surely has.

5 caskets, 1 family: The saddest sight of the tornado devastation

http://blog.al.com/breaking/2011/05/5_caskets_1_family_the_saddest.html

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Doing some research this morning, I just realized that 2 or more F5s on the same day has happened several other times in addition to 74. I have always read that last weeks outbreak was the second instance of more than one F5 in a single day, but it happened on May 25th 1955 and May 15th, 1968 as well. In addition to the Super Outbreak in 74.

It's been said that this is the second instance in which more than two F5 tornadoes have occurred on the same day, with the other being April 3, 1974. If you read otherwise, as you pointed out, the information was incorrect... but 4/27/2011 is the second time in recorded history that there have been three or more F5 tornadoes in the same day. As you pointed out, there have been several instances of more than one in an event... adding March 13, 1990 to that list, as well.

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