Leaderboard

Incoming long post So yesterday, I was googling about what Native Americans might've thought tornadoes and other natural disasters were, and how they dealt with the aftermath of them. I didn't get very far before I got distracted by the 1997 Jarrell, TX tornado. The tornado that struck the small town of Jarrell in the late afternoon of May 27th, 1997 was a monstrous anomaly. It had a lot of unusual characteristics, and as a result, was extremely destructive. Storm systems, and correspondingly tornadoes as well, generally move from west to east in the US, but the Jarrell tornado has a southwestern path. Most tornadoes travel at a speed around 30mph, and only stay on the ground about 10-15min. The tornado in question though was incredibly slow moving, seemingly stationary at some points, and was on the ground for 40min. It was also an F5, and had confirmed wind speeds of over 200mph, with some people estimating that at its strongest, winds were upwards of 300mph. When the tornado hit, it hit hard because the affected landscape was subjected to 200mph+ winds and flying debris for several minutes. One of the first places hit by the tornado was a neighborhood in Jarrell called Double Creek Estates. Before the storm, Double Creek Estates consisted of 50 homes, but by May 28th, the neighborhood was almost completely flattened. All the remained of the 38 houses in the storm's direct path was concrete foundations and mangled debris. If I'm not mistaken, all 27 deaths caused by the tornado happened in Double Creek Estates. About three hundred cows were also killed, and to give an idea of how badly the victims were injured, first responders had a hard time distinguishing human remains from livestock remains, and most victims had to be identified via dental records. In total, the twister traveled 7.6mi and caused $40mil in damage (not sure if this number has been adjusted for inflation or not). Extensive damage was done to the landscape too. Most trees were taken out by the winds, and most, if not all of the trees that were still standing by the end of it had their bark ripped off. Large portions of the grass were also missing due to ground scouring, and even large sections of asphalt has been ripped off some of the roads. How I got from Native Americans to this specific tornado though was because "supposedly" (in " " because I can't find any other mention of this legend outside of information about this tornado) there's a Native American legend that talks about a seeing a dead man walking in tornadoes. According to the legend, if you see the dead man walking, your death is imminent. (which, to be honest, is an understandable train of thought and was probably fairly accurate if the legend did actually exist before this event) Most people brushed this off when they heard it though partially because, a tornado looks like a tornado. There's nothing exactly humanoid about a funnel. The one picture of the tornado that hit Jarrell was taken at a very interesting moment though, and it definitely has an interesting shape to it. The tornado had multiple vortexes for some length of time (Can't find how long the multiple vortexes existed), so that's why it looks like that, but it's still pretty weird it aligned like that for any length of time. There's no known video of the dead man walking unfortunately, but it's a fascinating picture. and if anyone's curious, this blog has pictures of what the some of the damage Jarrell sustained looked like But uh.. yup. This is what I've been doing for the past 24 hours... I watched a documentary from 1999 on this, and it was quite the experience. Over dramatic acting, cheesy sound effects and primitive special effects. It was originally recorded on a vhs tape and the screen jumped around occasionally, there was a fuzzy, static-y bar at the top of the picture, and none of the commercials were cut out. The same AOL commercial played 3 times, and some of the commercials had AOL keywords in the corner--there was a blockbuster commercial too. It was gr8. tl;dr tornadoes are scary