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Identify the tornado — part II

  • Thread starter Thread starter Thomas Loades
  • Start date Start date
Larry, that's a rather famous photo of the tornado that hit a trailer park near Dunlap. It's one from a sequence caught by press photographer Paul Huffman. You can view the entire sequence on Blake Naftel's superb coverage of the Palm Sunday Outbreak on his website, mammatus.com. He includes several other Palm Sunday tornado photos there as well, along with quite a few damage photos.
 
Bob is Right!

Bob is correct in identifying the tornado and its location. However he forgit to answer the F question, 10 points off for missing that!

Here's a paragraph from my source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palm_Sund...ornado_Outbreak

The only F5 tornado of the outbreak formed near Wyatt, Indiana, and moved east-northeast toward the town of Dunlap, Indiana (this is the tornado pictured above right). This was the infamous "double tornado" that hit the Sunnyside subdivision. Most of the 36 people killed in the double tornado had no warning because the high winds had knocked out the telephone and power grids. For the first time in the U.S. Weather Bureau's history, all nine counties in the northern Indiana office's jurisdiction were under a tornado warning. This is called a "blanket tornado warning."
Click to expand...

It's Bob's turn!
 
I might add, the tornado was rated an F5.
My family lived in Niles, Michigan, at the time of the outbreak. I was around eight years old and already a confirmed tornado freak. My mother took me down to see damage near Dunlap. It's something I've never forgotten.
 
Ah, Larry...ya beat me to the punch! :oops:

My turn? Shoot, I'll rummage around and see what I've got, but it'll be a few days. Meanwhile, don't anyone wait on me if you've got something good.
 
Bob and Larry, to my knowledge none of the Palm Sunday tornadoes attained a rating higher than F4. Personally I don't trust Wikipedia. http://www.spc.noaa.gov/archive/tornadoes/f5torns.htm lists no F5 storms for april 11, 1965, neither does NCDC. I believe the only person who can settle this is Tom Grazulis; maybe Loades can provide additional information from Significant Tornadoes?

Bob Hartig wrote:
Does anyone have photos from the Palm Sunday 1965 outbreak that aren't available on the Net? If so, would you mind sharing them with us?
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All the photographs I know of are already on mammatus.com. Though there must be more out there. One area that needs to be looked closer at is the Dunlap area.

It was hit by 5 tornadoes through the afternoon, including the twin-funnels, and logic tells me that media, out covering the damage after the first tornadoes, must've gotten loads of photographs (and footage?) of the following tornadoes!

There's only one photograph on Naftel's page showing a tornado an hour after the twin-funnels:
http://www.mammatus.com/cgi-bin/i/PSO/DUNL...LAP_TORNADO.GIF

The damage in the foreground was done by the twin-funnels. Interestingly the caption reads: "F5 tornado north of Dunlap."

Oh and btw, Larry gets -30 points of his score because his F-rating was wrong :D
 
Simon, I've read the same thing regarding only F4s on Palm Sunday. I've seen the Sunnyside twin vortex referred to as both an F4 and an F5. There seems to be some uncertainty, and I'm certainly not in any position to settle the issue. I'll gladly defer to Grazulis.

I knew that the Dunlap area got nailed twice, but I was unaware there was as much tornadic action as you mention. I would love to get more details. It would be a great event for some enterprising journalistic type to dig into, particularly since--unlike the Great Tri-State Tornado and other past disasters--it's relatively recent history, and many of those who lived through it are still alive.

A week or so after the outbreak, a special section of the South Bend Tribune was published that provided local coverage of the disaster. It was titled "The Dark Passage." Many of the Palm Sunday tornado photos that are out on the Net appeared in it, but I recall one photo that I haven't seen since, and one that I've rarely encountered in print, and never on the Net. I'm tempted to contact the Tribune and see whether they have "The Dark Passage" somewhere in their archives. It's been many years, but I'd love to get my hands on it.
 
According to Significant Tornadoes, there were F5s on 4/11/1965 — just not according to the NWS. Anyway, Grazulis lists the Dunlap/Sunnyside, IN, and Strongsville/Grafton, OH events that day as F5, and notes that several F4s that day produced near-F5 damage. Some of the damage photos on www.mammatus.com show pretty obvious F5 damage; I don't know how this could have been overlooked when the NWS were assigning these historical F-scale rankings in the 1970s.

Oh, and I got one more thing on the 4/3/1974 Parker, IN tornado — photogrammetry of that 16mm film of the tornado showed winds of 284 mph about 1000 ft. above the ground, in a suction vortex. It was calculated that closer to ground level the winds were around 210 mph.

And I still can't post images properly! What am I supposed to be doing?
 
Bob Hartig wrote:I knew that the Dunlap area got nailed twice, but I was unaware there was as much tornadic action as you mention.
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A mistake on my part, Dunlap was hit by 2 tornadoes, while Elkhart county was hit by 5 tornadoes total. Naftel claims this on his website.

Ok, so we've established that:
1) two F5-rated tornadoes did infact occur on april 11, 1965.
2) Dunlap tornado #1 (the twin-funnels) was one of those tornadoes.
3) Dunlap tornado #2 hit an hour later at ~715pm and was an F4. Only one known photo depict this storm:
http://www.mammatus.com/cgi-bin/i/PSO/DUNL...LAP_TORNADO.GIF

Additional tornado photo-documentation:
The Kokomo, IN F4 tornado. Obviously more photographs exists of this storm than the one shown on mammatus.com, if you go by this quote: "Our photographers began taking pictureS..." from this article http://www.mammatus.com/cenindy.html

Dunlap, IN F4 tornado #2. It would seem reasonable to assume that media and area residents were out and about photographing the damage from the 1st tornado and thus would be in excellent position to witness and photograph the 2nd tornado that occured an hour later.

Toledo, OH F4 tornado. It's been mentioned several times that more photographs were taken than the one that is shown on mammatus.com

PS: I hope this makes sense, I've been awake for a long time LOL :lol:

Simon
 
I forgot, Thomas you post pictures by using the BBcode available to you when you're creating posts. Use
tags when linking to a picture file, and tags when linking to an html file with an embeded image. For example, the correct way to link to the Dallas photograph is to do this:

http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/historic/nws/wea02220.htm

Hopla!

Bob, call up the South Bend Tribune at once! :lol: I'm dying to see those photographs now. If you don't post them soon I'll start having dreams in my sleep where I discover those and finally see the storm itself. :o (This have actually occured, among others, with the Guin AL F5 tornado of april 3, 1974 :lol:)
 
OK, let's try this again:

Here's another purty picture for y'all to identify —
9d50b6f33235200774fc69d0c93be476.gif

Thanks for the help, Simon! :)
 
Glad I could be of help!

Ok I'll take a stab at this: Wichita Falls TX F4 tornado, april 10 1979 550pm?

I don't recall having seen this before, great choice!
 
you post pictures by using the BBcode available to you when you're creating posts.
Click to expand...

Simon, will this information work for scanned images? I've got a whammy of a historical photo to share, but I can't figure out how to insert it in this format using my Epson scanner.
 
Bob, here's what I think you should do:

1) Scan the photograph.
2)Change the format of the resulting image file to *.jpg. Your scanner probably saves it in *.bmp (Bitmap) format.
3)Upload it to a public server, ie your website or a photo hosting page. You can send it to me and I'll upload it to my own website if you want though.
4)When writing a post for this thread you just use BB-code like this:
[Broken External Image]:http://domain.com/filename.jpg
and your photo is automatically included!

I hope this makes sense.
 
It works on my end - wow WHAT a photo! :shock:

I have never seen it before though it reminded me of the b/w film of the Wichita Falls TX F5 tornado of april 3, 1964. Can't wait to see what everybody else guesses.
 
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