My Damage Survey of the Rome Tornado

At approximately 10:04 a tornado touched down in Rome, GA.... It traveled around 3 miles with around 95mph winds and at one point it was around 75yards wide. Not a very wide or long tracked tornado, but if you were hit by it it was life changing. I headed up to Rome yesterday to survey the damage myself to see what I thought since the NWS had just issued a statement that it was an ef1. This will be an analysis of what I saw and my conclusion.

Pic #1

This is the first thing I saw when I pulled up to the site. It looked like total debris slammed all over the place, like a tornado had torn it apart..... Once I got closer I saw something different as I looked at the rest of the building. The back of the building was directly perpendicular to where the wind was coming from. The wind hit that wall, went straight up and lifted the roof from behind and threw it over in one piece. I could tell because all the shingles were pointing down, and nails were pointing up. It all came down as one big piece and then fractured. At this point in time I had determined that this was straight line wind damage.

Pic #2

This house was directly across the street from where that roof was torn off. This actually was a simple assessment for me when we walked upon it. Every single piece of lumber was lined up in the exact same direction and all the trees that were lying down in that same direction too. It was very clear to me that this was straight line wind damage. So I had to figure out in my head how the NWS went with an EF1 when all was seeing was straight line wind damage. The only thing that was saying anything different was that the damage swath was very very narrow..... Straight line wind damage is usually very spread out. I had to go find the beginning of the track.

Pic #3

We wend back about 2 miles from where we were on Kingston Highway to find the starting point of the tornado and what I found floored me. It was a 75 yard wide area of giant pine trees that were again all knocked down in the exact same direction.... I was really scratching my head again on this trying to figure out how the NWS called this event a tornado....... So after thinking for a bit I again focused on the fact that the trees were all lying down in the same direction but was only 75 yards wide and stayed that wide. Also as I turned and looked more towards the right (south) I started seeing trees snapped mid trunk and thrown in directions a bit more towards the center of where this swath was... ahhhh, I was starting to see some convergent patterns where the trees to the right hand side of the path were bent a bit more towards the center of the swath. This is consistent with tornado damage.

Pic #4 and #5

As we walked away from the area that had a lot of trees laying down in the same direction we started to see some trees that were laying across each other, the roots were pointing in opposite directions, consistent with swirling winds inside a tornado. At this point in time for this specific location it seemed like tornado damage. But even up the road from there there were a lot of trees laying in the same direction in a very narrow path. And then it clicked.. What I thought was the center of the swath was actually the 12-6 o'clock position of a tornado!!!

Image I drew

It all goes back to the classical physics experiment with throwing a ball from a moving train... If you and I were standing on a flatbed on a train going 60mph and I threw the ball at you that was traveling at 60mph, it would hit you at 60mph. If you were standing on the ground and I was on a train going 60mph and threw the ball at 60 mph, it would hit you at 60mph(the speed of the ball) + 60mph(the speed of the train) = 120 mph!!!! This is called relative motion. So, same with the tornado with its winds (acting like a ball) and the motion of the tornado (the speed of the train) The tornado had max wind speeds of around 70mph according to the NWS, and it was moving at 40mph. so on the right hand side the relative winds (the wind speed the trees felt) was 110mph!!! On the left hand side they felt winds at 30mph which is weak and would do nothing to trees!?

Conclusion

What I had been looking at was the right hand side of the tornado path where with the combined speed of the winds of the tornado plus the forward momentum knocked down a 75 yard wide swath of trees.?

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Source: http://cascade.11alive.com/news/weather/104183-my-damage-survey-rome-tornado

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