The Tri-State Tornado of 1925
June 26, 2021 11:23 AM   Subscribe

The Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925, is the most destructive tornado on record in the United States. It was part of the deadliest tornado outbreak in U.S. history. This happened in the days before such events could be reliably forecast, and at a time when forecasters were forbidden to use the word "tornado." Stories from survivors are predictably chilling. Surviving the tornado required luck and a little counterintuitive thinking.
posted by bryon (9 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
Surviving the tornado...

Ahem: one must subscribe to WIRED to read that.
posted by y2karl at 11:35 AM on June 26, 2021 [2 favorites]


Apologies. I'm not finding a workaround for that.
posted by bryon at 11:42 AM on June 26, 2021


Wired's story "How to Survive the Worst Tornado in US History" non-paywalled on archive.is.
posted by ShooBoo at 1:25 PM on June 26, 2021 [7 favorites]


Thank you! I thoroughly enjoyed this.
posted by probably not that Karen Blair at 2:08 PM on June 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


The ban on the word [tornado] had been in effect since the 1880s, when weather forecasters first began developing methods of predicting tornadoes.
This would seem unbelievable to me if I hadn't lived through the Reagan years, up to today.
posted by MtDewd at 4:07 PM on June 26, 2021 [8 favorites]


CW on that American Heritage "stories from survivors" link; the first page includes a truly horrifying detail.

Also, the Wikipedia article on the Tri-State Tornado points out that it was part of a larger tornado event, and may have consisted of more than one tornado, although even if it was two separate cyclones, either one of them would still be the longest tornado track on record, and, of course, the survivors and victims wouldn't have cared.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:45 PM on June 26, 2021


Wow. That was a nasty one. I never heard about this particular outbreak before, even though it involved Indiana.

Here in Indiana, the "big killer tornado" reference you grow-up learning about is the Palm Sunday outbreak.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:55 AM on June 27, 2021


The suppression of tornado warnings was mentioned in the PBS American experience on Mr Tornado, a Post WWII Japanese engineer turned American scientist, Ted Fujita.
posted by childofTethys at 1:08 PM on June 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


That survivor story has a hell of a kicker.
posted by gottabefunky at 11:09 AM on June 28, 2021


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