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| Tornado damage in Moore, Oklahoma on Wednesday via @RebeccaFox25 on Twitter. |
A tornado caused quite a bit of damage in Moore, Oklahoma Wednesday evening.
If Moore, Oklahoma and tornadoes sound familiar to you, it should. Three massive and unusually strong tornadoes, two of the the strongest possible, have hit the community in the past 16 years.
Wednesday's tornado wasn't as strong as a tornado can get, but early reports indicated there is a fair amount of damage in Moore, but unlike the other three tornadoes, it doesn't look like vast stretches of Moore have been obliterated.
There are reports of injuries, but so far no super bad injuries or deaths in Moore. We do know an elementary school roof was ripped off, many homes were damaged, vehicles were overturned on highways and thousands have no electricity, reports Reuters.
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| Tornado debris in Sand Springs, Oklahoma Wednesday evening. Photo by Joey Johnson/Tulsa World. |
You can see of of those videos at the bottom of this post.
Other towns in the Plains were hit Wednesday by severe storms and tornadoes, too. At least one damaging tornado touched down near Tulsa, Oklahoma for instance.
At least one death has been reported at a mobile home park in Sand Springs, OK, and there have been in at least 15 injuries with this tornado and severe weather outbreak.
People had to be rescued from a gymnastics studio in that town when the tornado collapsed the structure. Sixty people were in the studio when the tornado hit, but none of them were injured, says Reuters.
As of early Thursday morning, NOAA's Storm Prediction Center had received eight reports of tornadoes, 31 reports of wind damage and 122 reports of large hail.
The high number of large hail reports isn't a surprise. Forecasters had expected this severe weather outbreak to be mostly a damaging hail event. The number of damaging tornadoes is, to me, a bit of a surprise with this one, though.
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| Scary storm clouds menace Tulsa, OK. Wednesday. |
Today, there is a marginal risk of a couple strong to severe storms right along the East Coast from North Carolina to central New Jersey. There won't be nearly the number of severe reports as there was yesterday.
There also might be a few severe storms in the southern half of Florida on Friday. No widespread severe weather outbreaks are forecast at least into the middle of next week.
MOORE IN PERSPECTIVE
I don't think there's any town in the world that has been hit as often and as hard by tornadoes as Moore, Oklahoma. The chances of this happening are incredibly small.
A mammoth EF5 tornado, the strongest possible, destroyed a big chunk of heavily populated Moore in May, 2013, killing 24 people.
Another EF5 tornado hit Moore in May, 1999. It was the strongest known tornado ever measured, with winds as high as 318 mph.
Yet another severe tornado hit Moore hit Moore in May, 2003. This one was a borderline EF3/EF4,. Not as strong as the other two, but still among the nastiest you can get.
Four videos of the storms next:
Here's some of that dramatic video from a helicopter as shown on News9 in Oklahoma City as Wednesday's tornado toucned down in Moore.
Here's some storm chasers that got too closer to the tornado in Sand Springs, Oklahoma. Extra demerits to them for parking under an overpass. Some people think it's safer parking there in a tornado but it's actually especially unsafe, because the underpass accelerates wind and debris.
The video was shot by a tornado chasing group called Basehunters, and they're usually pretty good. There might be some extenuating circumstances or they accidentally got caught at the overpass.
Here's the vid:
Next, from Stormchasingvideo.com, we have more images of the Sand Spring, Oklahoma tornado, along with incredible views of wall clouds and severe weather in and around Tulsa. Turn down the volume for this because there's a lot of wind noise. Unavoidable, because, duh, it's windy near tornadoes:
Also from Stormchasingvideo.com, we have this video of tornado damage in Moore, and big hail.
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