A year ago today, the Mayfield tornado (Bowling Green, Paducah: house, theater)

[kygman]

At this time of the morning a year ago, we had no idea what was coming our way. Our local TV weathermen had been warning everybody to keep an eye out and be prepared but, we'd all heard it before. Then it hit. It passed a few blocks from our house but, we live in a 110 yr old double brick house, and the house shook. I was on the phone with my son when it came through. You know how when you drive through a low spot, the other person's voice breaks up. That's what happened. We made it through OK at that time, but my wife had problems later. We stayed a couple nights with her granddaughter 50 miles away (power was out in town for a week), then the governor opened up all the state park lodges for everybody displaced. Several nights my wife would wake up crying, wondering why others died and she was still alive. All I could do was hold her and give her a shoulder to cry on. We're doing good on that part now. Just took time. Please think of the families and friends of the 24 who died here in Graves County that night and all the others across the state.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag4dYolTLdI


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOkPTzxqIWc

I know you won't watch all 5 hours of this second video, but just wanted to show you what we were watching that night. These two weathermen were awesome and have received praise from all over the country for their coverage. The tornado comes into Kentucky at 1:27. At 1:33, Noah has to move off screen after seeing the size of the debris ball (in the purple). 1:54 is when it hits Mayfield and it was probably a few minutes after that our power went out.

[censusdata]

I've been a weather geek since childhood. This event isn't just historic for Kentucky but for global tornado history. It's the closet event to the longest and 2nd deadliest global tornado on record, the 1925 Tri State Tornado that hit about 100 miles north of this one. Best measure of tornado strength via radar is 'gate to gate' rotation and this storm ranks second all time to the 1999 Moore OK F5.

The day before I saw some insane weather models showing Tri State 1925 like continuous rotation tracks, location being either through Evansville IN or right down the 'parkways' corridor of KY. The later one was spot on. The most similar storm in history to this killed 800 people in 1925. 57 is a horrible death toll but many hundreds of lives were saved with modern warnings. In downtown Mayfield a retired NWS worker evacuated a theater which was later destroyed. That's probably 20+ lives saved. In Bremen killed fewer people because 14 people took shelter in a professional grade storm shelter built in 1988. NWS Paducah actually lost power and radar (I think storm was towards Princeton then) and NWS Springfield MO had to take over warnings.

Once the storm got into KY I looked for a Paducah TV station to watch on Facebook and happened upon the same coverage. There are much larger markets that have no where near that quality of severe weather coverage. Gary Hart in Evansville market also did a great job and saved lives. Bowling Green's mini tv market covered the storm then they lost power as the EF3 moved into Bowling Green later that night.

[kygman]

I knew it was going to be bad, but when Noah Bergren got shook up and had to move off camera after seeing the mile wide debris ball at 20,000 ft., I knew we'd better be braced for something major.

[censusdata]

The gate to gate is what blew my mind. As the Mayfield storm crossed the Mississippi River into TN it was 284 mph, much higher than Tuscaloosa or Joplin. GtG is a very reliable way to determine tornado strength. Anything above 200 mph is very rare. The debris tracker (correlation coefficient) is newer technology, out since around 2019. I have never seen debris swirl up from the tornado into the middle of the storm ever before.