1925-03-18 - Tri State Tornado - "Lost" photos found.

[John Farley]

The seasonality of the F4+ tornadoes in southern IL, as shown on Dan's map, is interesting: 2 in December, 2 in March, 1 in February, 1 in September, just one in "tornado season" (May). When I lived in that area, my first chase tornado was on December 23, 1996. That seemed like an oddity at the time, and still does to some degree, but perhaps not all that unusual in that area. Certainly very strong dynamics can occur there when winter warm spells come to an end.

 

[Shawn Schuman]

So, today is the 90th anniversary of the Great Tri-State tornado, perhaps the most singularly exceptional tornado event in US history. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the details, but what people may not know is that there was a small but significant outbreak of other strong/violent tornadoes across parts of Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. I have a bunch of photos and other info in the article I wrote on the event if anyone would like to learn more.

 

[James K]

I have a bunch of photos and other info in the article I wrote on the event if anyone would like to learn more.

OMG ... that was quite an eye-opening read.

 

[Shawn Schuman]

Thanks James! It was certainly a unique event. Fascinating from a meteorology perspective, but also almost unfathomable in the scale of destruction and human suffering. I've done a ton of research on the event but it's still hard to fully comprehend.

 

[Jeff Wright]

There is an article called “The 1925 Tri-StateTornado-“ at gothichorrorstories.com
with art depicting what the storm may have looked like.

Working two jobs as I do, I don’t have the time to, say, pick the brains of Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi—but I would not be surprised if HPL might have got wind of this event….and was influenced by it.

March of 1925 figures into some of his stories. Similarly. 1979’s movie METEOR seems to foreshadow 9/11 with a splinter hitting the Twin Towers…

 

[Ryan H]

I had found this on the Blog website.

The Great Tri-State Tornado - WDRB Weather Blog

At approximately 1:00 pm on March 18, 1925 an extremely violent and long lived tornado touched down near the town of Ellington Missouri. During the next three and a half hours, the storm would travel over 200 miles while destroying everything in it's path. At the end of the day,...

fox41blogs.typepad.com

I had tried to clean up and remastered as much as I could without losing too much detail. But what I do get is it is the Tri State Tornado nearing its peak width in the farms field of Illinois, Hamilton or White counties around 3:25-30 PM (Central Standard Time).

Don't know if this is real or not but if its real then it one of the rarest image of the Tornado itself.

 

[Mike Smith]

Ryan, that is fantastic. Great work!

 

[Ryan H]

Ryan, that is fantastic. Great work!

Thanks, I had also uploaded that on the Wikipedia of the Tri State Tornado. The image is in low res which means unless the higher quality version of it is found. This is the only type of image I could find.

Also this image reminds me of the El Reno Tornado due to the wall cloud really close to the ground and while not as big, it almost behaved in the same way during the latter part of the journey with sub vortices being reported by eyewitness of Griffen as a several funnels that “moved around and then came together.”

 

[Jeff Wright]

I had found this on the Blog website.

The Great Tri-State Tornado - WDRB Weather Blog

At approximately 1:00 pm on March 18, 1925 an extremely violent and long lived tornado touched down near the town of Ellington Missouri. During the next three and a half hours, the storm would travel over 200 miles while destroying everything in it's path. At the end of the day,...

fox41blogs.typepad.com

View attachment 23998

Looks like a shark mouth facing left.

 

[Ryan H]

It turns out that this is not the Tri State Tornado image. It really Wichita Falls F4 that the WDRB Weather Blog author has taken and did some tracing and/or photoshopped it.


I had to apologize to everyone for hyping up an image that did not exist. I did not know that this image was doctored to fool me and the readers who are looking for this.

 

[Mark Gressman Jr]

Too bad I'm just now seeing this, as I've run across this image in an older post here at StormTrack. That post speculated that it was another well known storm that didn't have any photos IIRC. Thanks for the effort though, as any new possible developments into the Tri-State is worth the post.