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Eye of EF-5 Joplin tornado was calm
Copied from article: http://www.joplinglobe.com/news/loca...9dec1ee4e.html
There are pictures of the survivors and a video of inside the tornado from a school's surveillance on website.
Quote:
Eric Parker, his sister Kaylee Parker and her friend Mac Wright didn’t want a close encounter with a tornado on May 22.
They just wanted to watch it.
But every move they made that afternoon put them in the path of the tornado. They would eventually experience the tornado in the Alps Liquor Store at 26th and Main streets.
One of them would even look up inside it, experiencing something that others in its path also reported: The May 22 tornado was so big that it had an eye. People were actually aware they were inside it, if only momentarily.
Bill Davis, head meteorologist with the National Weather Service station at Springfield, said the eye of the Joplin tornado might have been as wide as 300 yards. The tornado itself was three-quarters of a mile wide. If the tornado was traveling at 10 to 25 mph, being in the eye would last a few seconds, he said.
“If you were in it, you could sense that things had slowed down,’’ Davis said.
While such a phenonemon is rare, Joplin is not the only place it has happened.
Right turn
“We were storm chasing over on West Seventh Street,’’ said Eric Parker, 22, of Joplin. “We could see over by Riverton that the clouds were spinning like crazy. There was wind and lightning. It looked really bad.
“Since most tornadoes go to the northeast, we went south to 32nd Street and Central City Road. We thought we would get south of it,’’ said Parker.
What Parker did not know was that the May 22 tornado was a right-turning tornado that was headed to the southeast. His sister would drive them to Wildwood Ranch, the spot where the tornado would drop from the sky and where there is no road to go farther south.
“The inflow was unbelievable. I bet it was 60 mph. The air was rushing over the ground in front of you and being pulled up into the sky,’’ said Parker.
They went east on 32nd Street. They stopped to look back at the storm from a gravel parking lot near Country Club Road. They decided they had better keep moving.
“We were going to stop at the McDonald’s at 32nd and McClelland. But we realized we had better not be stopping,’’ he said. “We had that feeling something was not right. It was then that we could see this black mass coming at us.’’
What they saw was a rain-wrapped tornado that was rapidly exploding into an EF-5 with wind speeds of more than 200 mph. Rain was spinning horizontally around the tornado.
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Rest of article on website
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